It's good to see you this January 26th.

First up, except for Canada and continental Chile,

the dangerous Zika virus is expected to spread to every country in the Americas.

That's according to the World Health Organization,

and it's because the mosquito that transmits the virus

is found throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Zika was first discovered in Central Africa in the 1940s.

80 % of people who catch it have no symptoms,

others might get a fever or rash for a few days.

But Zika has been linked to an increase in babies born with microcephaly,

which can cause abnormally small heads and severe delays

in children's development. There's no treatment and no cure.

So the US Centers for Disease Control is urging pregnant woman

to avoid many countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

There are also concerns about this years Summer Olympics in Brazil.

Though officials say there will be fewer mosquitoes around

when the games are played in August, a winter month in Brazil.

The mayor of Washington DC says it will be days

before snow is removed from some parts of the nation's capital.

Some schools in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York

are still closed after a major weekend snowstorm.

Across the Pacific, millions are dealing with similar weather.

A cold shock spreading record low temperatures across East Asia.

Frost in a place known more for its flowers.

Hong Kong saw record low temperatures over the last few days,

accumulating ice, trapping hikers on one of the city's famous mountain trails.

Dozens were treated for hypothermia in the coldest weather

the city has experienced in decades. Hong Kong wasn't alone.

Across Asia we've seen bitter winter weather,

nowhere hit harder than in Taiwan.

State media there reported at least 85 people, most of them elderly,

died from hypothermia or cardiac conditions

likely caused by the frigid air. It's an island where most of the homes

don't have central heating, it's people simply not used to the cold.

And the winter weather caused travel nightmares across the region.

Take the South Korean island of Jeju.

It's a popular destination for tourists,

many of whom were forced to camp out in the airport over the weekend.

Over a thousand flights were cancelled,

affecting around 90, 000 travelers. And in Southern China, a similar story.

Train tracks were shut down and highways were closed

due to snowy conditions in the eastern and southern portions of the country.

Areas known more for good food and balmy weather than for snow.

Hundreds of flights were canceled, too,

on the first weekend of the incredibly busy Chinese New Year travel season.

This weekend was the day of weather first's for many in East Asia.

Just asked these school kids, gingerly stepping through snow

on the Japanese island of Amami Oshima.

No one who lives on the island has ever seen it snow there before,

because it's the first time it's happened in 150 years.

Matt Rivers, CNN, Beijing.

This roll call, like, every roll call is brought to you by Yesterday's

Transcript Page at cnnstudentnews. com.

Rock Valley Middle School is in Iowa,

it's the home of the Rockets who totally rock it in Rock Valley.

To the southeast, Pine View Middle School is in Florida,

it's the home of the Panthers, the big cats of Land O' Lakes.

And on the island of Taiwan,

we're making a stop in Taipei today to say hello to the students

of Grace Christian Academy.

We're kicking off a two- part series today on the past,

and potential future, of transportation.

Planes, trains, and automobiles.

If you think that cars have come a long way since the gilded age,

and rockets have come a long way from the space age,

you might be amazed at how little has changed,

and how much could change in the decades ahead.

We first got seriously moving with the help of steam power.

In 1802 a British mining engineer Richard Trevithick

built the first large scale steam powered locomotive.

In 1879, a German engineer, Karl Benz,

developed the first internal combustion engine,

burning fuel like oil and petrol to power pistons.

And so the car was born. Only five years later in 1884,

the first electric car whirred into life,

thanks to a British inventor, Thomas Parker.

His vehicle was battery- powered and was tested on the streets of London.

Man famously first took flight in 1903, in North Carolina in America,

with the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, and their propeller plane the Wright Flier 1.

The flight was just 12 seconds, barely seven meters off the ground,

but immutably historic.

1940 saw the invention of the jet engine by a British engineer, Frank Whittle,

first used in fighter planes towards the end of the Second World War.

And then commercial passenger liners from 1949,

with the British De Havilland Comet.

Fast forward 50 years or so, there's now a greater sense of urgency

amongst scientists to find cheaper, more energy efficient,

quicker ways of getting us around.

Richard Varvel is an engineer,

he spent his entire career designing rocket and jet engines.

Varvel and his colleagues are taking a unique approach.

A hybrid rocket and jet engine, the SABRE.

The fundamental problem is that a state of the art rocket engine,

it's performance in terms of its fuel consumption is too high.

So the sort of central principle behind the engine

that we're working on is to basically synthesize a rocket engine

with an air breathing engine like a jet engine.

For this to be worthwhile, the air breathing engine

has to operate up to speeds maybe twice as high

maybe as a sort of conventional jet engine can reach.

So the holy grail of space flight has been to get a machine

that can fly into space and come back again,

and do it cheaply and safely and reliably.

And in fact there has been no real progress in terms of the way

in which we get into space since the very start of the Space Age.

So the actual technology we're working on is designed to solve that problem.

Although the SABRE is being designed to take us into orbit,

it may usher in a new era of travel back on earth, the Hypersonic Age.

The LAPCAT plane, as they call it, promises staggering speeds

of more than 3, 000 miles an hour.

Or put another way, flying from London to Sydney in four hours.

What we have to do now is build an actual running engine.

And that we're planning to do by the end of the decade.

And that will then hopefully sort of destroy

all the other naysayers that think that this can't be done.

So yesterday was a holiday,

but we're not gonna judge you if you didn't realize it was bubble wrap appreciation day.

This happens every year on the last Monday in January.

It's all about the plastic package cushioning

that both protects whatever's being shipped and happens to be really fun to pop.

CNN visited the factory and found that bubble wrap is only part of its story.

Inside Sealed Air's headquarters, in Saddle Brook, New Jersey,

they make it by the truckload every hour.

But there's something new happening.

In their lab, they're creating boxes that self- inflate,

bubbles that inflate on site, and packaging that takes the shape

of a product once it's cracked, much like a hand warmer.

This is not made out of plastic.

It's made out of mushrooms. Mushroom that I can eat?

Mushroom that you can eat. Doesn't smell. It doesn't smell like mushroom.

Does it taste like mushroom? No. No.

But bubble wrap started it all. And like other brilliant inventions,

it was made by accident. The story begins in 1957

when these guys were trying to make wallpaper.

It didn't quite stick, but from that failure, bubble wrap was born.

What is the secret to making bubble wrap?

I'm not gonna say that. Come on down.

This would be one of the resins that we're using on the product.

And this is essentially plastic? This is plastic.

And then it gets sucked up into these tubes to- From here

we will suck it up into any one of the three lines.

To form the bubbles, the plastic is melted down at 500 degrees

into a consistency like molasses.

Once we vacuum form the bubble then we extrude another layer of material

to seal the air inside the bubble.

It's cut down to size by a million dollar machine.

And there are over 100 different kinds of bubble wrap,

customized for almost every major shipping company in the world.

Bubble wrap is actually only 3 % of the company's revenue.

Their newer, innovative packaging isn't so easy to pop.

So this is kind of a thing of the past,

and this is a thing of the present and future.

That's exactly right. No bubble wrap!

So if you wrap a bobble- head in bubble wrap,

does that make it a bubble- head?

If you pop bubble wrap with your teeth, does that make it bubble gum?

If you drop it, do you bobble it or bubble it? If skip it,

are you thinking outside the bubble? And if you do nothing but pop it,

are you bubbling with a bobble or bobbling with a bubble, or bobbling with a bobble?

I hate to burst your bubble y'all, but that wraps things up for us today.

Stop by tomorrow, we'll keep the puns popping.