All Blog Posts from Tech Talk

A short posting today about a story airing this weekend on CBS Sunday Morning. It's another take on ice (you might remember I did a story in early February pegged to ice in a culinary sense), and this time it's tied to a new Nova/National Geographic special airing next week entitled "Extreme Ice." Photographer James Balog has spent the past two years capturing climate change in "real time" via 27 time-lapse cameras in places like Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Montana. We also talk to Jim White from the University of Colorado as he analyzes ice core samples and explains how Balog's dramatic photos can provide illumination even for a science community that often gets too fixated on numbers. I hope you'll be watching.

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UPDATE: The FAA has backed off its claim that the fireball was connected to the satellite collision, so the mystery has been solved -- it was a meteor.

First there was the news last week that a U.S. Iridium communications satellite slammed into a defunct Russian military satellite, each weighing more than a thousands pounds and traveling at 17,500 miles per hour. The collision, taking place about 500 miles over Siberia, created hundreds of pieces of debris to add to the growing total of space junk. Then Sunday video was captured of a mysterious fireball searing across the Texas sky -- but nothing has been discovered on the ground. Coincidence? A meteor or part of a satellite? It's becoming something of a space mystery and we'll have that story tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

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Working late tonight to finish a story for tomorrow's Early Show about a new warning from scientists about the pace of global warming. The AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) met in Chicago over the weekend and released a dire warning: previous models of industrial greenhouse gas emissions were low, and the feedback loop associated with warming temperatures will only escalate. What does this mean for the planet? You can read more here, and be sure to watch Monday morning.

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Google Earth is getting a facelift. If you're a regular user, then you've noticed that about 70 percent of the Earth's surface has been, well, missing from the exploratory features. But with the latest update, Google Earth 5.0, people will now be able to dive into the deep blue from their desktop.

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It's the end of the week and I'm feeling a little space-y. But can you blame me? It started with experiencing zero gravity, was followed up with watching the Phoenix Mars Lander touch down on the Red Planet, and this weekend Discovery is scheduled to head to the international space station, in part to deliver some critical components: a toilet repair kit.

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It's the end of the week and I'm feeling a little space-y. But can you blame me? It started with experiencing zero gravity, was followed up with watching the Phoenix Mars Lander touch down on the Red Planet, and this weekend Discovery is scheduled to head to the international space station, in part to deliver some critical components: a toilet repair kit.

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Think of it as a snapshot of Americana, frozen in time for all to see. It's Google's new "Street View." To see what I mean, just type your address in a Google search bar, click on "Maps" and then "Street View." Oh, one important note: you have to have to live in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami or New York to see it in action. Google does say more cities are on the way though, so yours may be next.

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