Smog Blog Takes Flight
Pigeons Beam Back Pollution Info From The Air Above Los Angeles
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Play CBS Video Video The Pigeon Blog Only On The Web: Beatriz da Costa talks about how she came up with the idea of using pigeons to monitor air pollution and report the findings online.
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Video Blogging Pigeons A woman has seen her offbeat idea for addressing air pollution come to fruition. As Bill Whitaker reports, it involves backpack-wearing pigeons and the Internet.
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A bird blogger strapped with pollution-monitoring equipment takes flight. (CBS)
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"Blogging pigeons. I don't know; do you think that's what you see every day?" says creator Beatriz da Costa, an artist, engineer and professor at the University of California, Irvine, in smoggy southern California. "I was wondering if there was a way to address air pollution using living organisms of a sort."
Da Costa set out to discover whether lowly pigeons, often considered a public nuisance, could be enlisted to do some public good by monitoring air pollution with tiny tracking devices on their backs.
At first, da Costa's students thought the idea was — pardon the pun — bird-brained. But homing pigeon trainer Bob Matsuyama thought it just might work. "The big thing we had to do was get them used to flying with backpacks on their backs," says Matsuyama.
The team devised a feather-weight minipack with an antenna, a cell phone SIM card, global positioning system equipment and a pollution sensor. The GPS tracks the pigeon's exact location, the sensors pick up airborne pollutants and the information is text-messaged to the Web site.
"I don't want to be cheesy about it. I mean, they're birds," says da Costa. "But yes, they are reporting back information that's interesting and important to us. So I'm using the metaphor in that way of reporting and blogging it."
So the next time you see some pesky pigeons, don't shoo them — Google them, because these birds of a feather blog together.
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The secrets of tennis legend 




"Speed = 27.2mph (16.9 km/h)"
Errors like that just give comfort to Al Qaeda.
Mike Kurtzner
VP Camelia Capitol Combine
Fort Sutter Racing Pigeon Club Member
P.S. If you were European, you would have realized your mistake.