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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Do you work at an e-mail-free Friday company? There’s an article in today’s USA Today that points out the growing trend. The idea being to encourage more phone calls or face-to-face meetings. I’m just as tethered to my inbox as the next person, but it seems to me productivity would drop dramatically. I could certainly see a decrease in stress, which would be welcome, but in the news business e-mail is necessary, and dropping it from the day’s communication tools would be detrimental to business. In an office environment with more internal networking, perhaps it might work better. But wouldn’t all those requisite social niceties really slow things down? Your thoughts? And now for a quick recap...

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I won't even pretend to be an expert in photo microscopy. Sure, I loved microscopes in science classes, and I've dabbled in semi-professional photography over the years but mainly rock concerts and stage shows. But we're talking images of plankton at 400X magnification. That takes a whole different level of skill, understanding and squinting. So I was a little surprised when Nikon approached me to help judge their annual Small World competition. But I jumped at the chance.

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