Name: Insects That Eat Plastic? | October 7, 2020
Uploaded: 2020-10-24T02:46:01.000Z
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Hurricane Delta Headlines Today's show that's not a name that's in the regular rotation will explain why in a moment, but first the storm, it's powerful, and it got that way quickly.

Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricane's wind speeds increased by 35 MPH orm, or over a 24 hour period.

By Tuesday afternoon, Hurricane Delta's wind speeds increased by 85 MPH in a day.

That hasn't happened since 2005 when Hurricane Wilma struck Cancun, Mexico.

That same city was in the direct path of Hurricane Delta.

It was expected to make landfall Wednesday morning as a Category four storm.

Forecasters predicted it's sustained wind speeds would be between 131 156 MPH.

That makes Delta capable of catastrophic damage and its storm surge.

The rise in sea water levels blown ashore by a hurricane was expected to be 6 to 9 ft higher than normal tide levels.

This has been an active hurricane season.

Atlantic storms have used up all 21 names on the annual list, and Delta is the 25th storm that needed a name.

So forecasters air using Greek letters like Delta and Gamma to identify the new systems.

It's the first time they've had to do that since the record hurricane season of 2005.

And Delta could become the first hurricane with a Greek letter ever recorded to strike the United States after hitting Mexico.

Forecasters predicted the storm would then move into the western Gulf of Mexico and possibly hit the U.

They say there's still a lot of uncertainty about where the storm will go and how strong it will become once it's in the Gulf.

What Italian city is also known by the nickname Satyan, Eczema, Palermo, Genoa, Venice or Florence, meaning serene.

La Serenissima was a nickname for the Republic of Venice.

Aqua Alta is another Italian term related to our next story.

It describes the very high tide that traditionally causes flooding throughout much of Venice.

This has been going on for 1200 years, but in Aqua Alta that hit last November was particularly damaging.

It flooded almost 90% of the city and that combined with the coronavirus pandemic caused tourist visits to plummet.

Last Saturday was supposed to be the first aqua alta of the season.

But instead of this, ST Mark's Square looked more like this pretty dry except for some large puddles circling around the drains.

Since 1984 a project has been a development to try to stem the floods of Venice.

It involves 78 flood barriers installed around the city.

They're supposed to rise up to form a damn when Aqua Alta arrives, keeping the Adriatic Sea from flooding Venice.

It's been repeatedly delayed and distorted by corruption and controversy, and many Venetians thought it wouldn't work.

Places that are normally knee deep in floodwaters were mostly dry on Saturday, and Italian politicians called it a clear success for the project.

The barriers air Onley set up to rise when the tide hits a very high level.

If it falls short of that level, the barriers stay down, but the city can still flood.

That's what happened the next day, and that's why some Venetians were disappointed.

They're hoping the barriers will be adjusted to rise sooner, preventing any seasonal flooding in the city.

It's the latest hit to the entertainment industry because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Regal Cinemas is closing all of its theaters across the United States.

The question is whether the more than 500 closures are temporary or become permanent.

The decision comes after the second biggest theater chain in the world reopened in July and comes just days after the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, was delayed until next spring.

Sina World Group, which owns Regal, is also closing 127 theaters in the United Kingdom.

The closures will affect 45,000 employees globally.

Could mealworms be the solution to the proliferation of plastic in the environment?

No, at least not alone, according to a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, Ramani Narayan says it would take an extraordinary amount of mealworms to break all this down.

He adds that using existing industrial methods to recycle plastics and then designing new ones that are easier to break down would be better solutions.

But if scientists can take research involving mealworms and use it to develop a large scale method of breaking down plastics.

It could be another weapon in the war against plastic waste.

1000 mealworms can eat about 2 g of plastic a week, so it would take three or 4000 mealworms to eat this Styrofoam cup about a week.

That's Anya Brandon, a scientist at Stanford University.

She studies how these eat this and yet can still be used to feed these.

So we all know that plastics are a huge issue facing the environment, especially in the marine environment.

We're all looking for good ways on how to deal with all this plastic waste that we have.

Um, and we found that mealworms, or these tiny, innocuous insects found pretty much everywhere, can eat and degree.

A few different types of plastic mealworms air basically the larvae of the type of darkling beetle.

They do have a commercial use as food for livestock, like pigs and chickens.

But then it was discovered in 2015 that these little grubs could eat polystyrene, and a whole new line of research opened up, one that Brandon has pursued.

So why these little mealworms are able to eat plastics is still an open question where chills trying to research that there's other insects out there that eat predominantly wax, which is also full of long chain polymers.

And it looks like somehow evolutionarily these insects that are used thio eating and breaking down these naturally existing big polymers, our fortuitously able to break down some of these plastics that we're putting into the world.

Brandon's first discovery was that it wasn't just poly styrene that mealworms chomped down on the eight polyethylene to.

That's really cool, because one issue that we have with plastic waste is that it's really hard to recycle multiple types of plastics together.

So it's the energy from breaking down the plastics polymer bonds that the mealworms air after they do this, using a powerful bacteria in their gut, which breaks down the majority of the plastic into nothing but hydrogen and carbon.

But there are other ingredients and plastics that are not quite so easy to break down.

There's all sorts of crazy chemicals used in plastics manufacturing, from stabilizers to plasticizers to flame retardants.

And that's a problem because we know that some of these chemicals can be toxic.

When Brandon looked into this, she found that some degraded plastics did come out the other end of the meal worm and flushed out.

With them came all the chemicals that could do harm further up the food chain, so they're not bio accumulating.

That means that this meal worm is still a valuable feed source, which is great.

But it's not the feed industry Brandon is interested in for her research.

And to do that, she needed to understand how Meal worm does what it does.

So we're looking and trying to isolate the bacteria from the mealworms gut to be able to scale those up in these big vats that we call bio reactors that air just chock full of bacteria you can throw your plastic in, and hopefully we'll all breakdown Mhm.

You can see here the trees behind me are all still standing, and you might have noticed that I try not to talk to you like a plastic news reporter.

And we're going behind the scenes to explain some tips on being mawr yourself when you're on camera.

This is part of our partnership with AT and T s Youth Voices Collective.

We've assembled a Siris of special editions featuring yours truly and student questions about journalism.

You can find it at CNN 10 dot com and youtube dot com slash CNN.

I think the last time we covered drones in a football stadium, they were racing this one's going toe work at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

There's a National Football League game coming up on Sunday, and fans will be allowed back in the stands.

So a few drones have been hired to spray disinfectant in an attempt to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

This is believed to be the first time a stadium has used drones to do this.

We don't know how the costs stack up against other methods, but we know that proponents will drone on about the benefits, saying they hope this propellers others to do the same thing.

While critics will look for different promotes of cleaning mawr within their control wherever it lands, it's an interesting idea that was floated and thankfully the roof retracts toe let in both drones and Falcons.

I'm Carlos, whose for CNN 10 Melcher Dallas is a city in Iowa.

It's also the home of the Saints of Melcher Dallas High School.

Thank you for watching youtube dot com slash CNN.

 10 is where we received their shout out requests E. 