This summer, for the first time in recorded history, there may be no ice on the North Pole. In a dramatic symptom of climate change, the thick frozen layer at the pole is likely to melt away entirely, turning the top of the world from sea ice to sea water.

NASA spent $420 million to send the Phoenix Lander to Mars last year. Festooned with state-of-the-art detection equipment, the rover's task was to scour the red surface in search of elusive Martian ice. And today, the NASA mission finally did uncover some extraterrestrial frost, and it did it with its simplest tool, a shovel.

Marc Norman is standing ice-side in the new skating rink in Salt Lake City, Utah-the site of this year's Winter Olympics. It's noisy in here: Workers are installing a high-tech dehumidifying system. Speaking over the persistent clanging, Norman makes a prediction. "Once that's completed," he says, "we will be able to control just about everything that happens in this building."