Name: An Above-Ground Pool....But For Real Though | May 4, 2021
Uploaded: 2021-05-10T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 10 min 1 s
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Hi, I'm Carl Azuz, it's great to have you along for today's show, which covers everything from a space splashdown to a suspended pool that's making a splash.

Transition words & phrases

It's traditional that after giving a state of the union speech or an annual message—as we saw last week—a US president hits the road.

The leader spends time at rallies and events to meet with supporters and to try to drum up support for the proposals outlined in the speech.

He's released two major economic plans: One is titled the American Families Plan and the other is the American Jobs Plan.

The first would include more childcare programs, free preschool, free community college.

The second would include spending on roads, bridges, and new climate-centered programs.

Together, the two plans would cost almost 4 trillion dollars, and they've got to get through Congress first.

This branch of government controls the purse strings.

And even though the President's fellow Democrats have the majority of votes in both chambers, it's a slim majority, especially in the Senate, with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, would be the tie-breaking vote if there's a 50-50 Senate split.

At this point, it's not clear if the President's proposals have enough congressional support to pass, it's not clear if there's enough agreement on how to pay for them, and it's not clear if they'll get any support from Republicans who've released an infrastructure plan of their own.

One thing lawmakers might do is break up the President's large proposals to pass smaller chunks that can get support from both parties.

10-second trivia: NASA's Apollo 8 mission was noteworthy for doing what?

Orbiting the Earth, orbiting the moon, the first space broadcast, or a lunar module landing.

In 1968, 3 astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon.

That was also the last time a spacecraft carrying astronauts made a nighttime splashdown—a landing in the ocean—until Sunday.

4 travelers aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule arrived in the Gulf of Mexico after spending 5 months on the international space station.

It's the most expensive object ever built—the US spends 3 to 4 billion dollars per year to run and maintain it.

And NASA is looking for more partners to help with that at a time when at least one of them—Russia—says it's going to leave the project in 2025.

Space is supposed to be vast, unless you are 1 of the 11 space explorers posing elbow to elbow recently on the International Space Station.

For NASA and SpaceX, it's one crew starting and another one ending.

Add in 2 cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut who arrived on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in April, and it was officially a full house in the floating space lab.

For over a week, the 11 stellar roommates bunked together in a place NASA says is the size of a six-room house.

The record number of people aboard the ISS is 13, set back in the space shuttle era.

Still, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet from Crew-2 says it was a tight squeeze.

6 sleeping spots for 11 members of the crew—that means 5 camp out.

There are people scattered around the entire module.

We try to be mindful—people have been trained on that.

Wiggle room will return to the ISS with the departure of SpaceX's crew-1.

Astronaut Shannon Walker says she's proud of what her team accomplished since they arrived last November.

I think about all the science that we did and the repairs that we made and—what, did we make some good repairs on the space station?

Crew-1's return is the first night splashdown of the US crewed spacecraft since 1968.

But Walker says her time aboard the Space Station is something she won't soon forget.

What really is going to remain with me is the camaraderie and the friendship and the time that we have spent together.

The laughing that we do over dinners, the movie nights that we have had have truly made this very special.

And if any returning astronauts feel a little nostalgic, they need only check out the images posted by Crew-2's Shane Kimbrough for a peek at the Earth few Earthlings get to see firsthand.

Crew-1's completed mission is the first of 6 crew rotations to the ISS by NASA and SpaceX, plans that should keep the ISS a busy place for years to come.

Fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil are used to produce electricity, heat our homes, and power gasoline engines.

But when they're burned to create energy, they release carbon dioxide into the air.

And it's that kind of CO2 that scientists blame for a number of environmental problems.

There are several organizations working on ways to deal with CO2 emissions.

Some focus on switching to other forms of energy, others focus on removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere—you're about to see one.

There are concerns that ropes of kelp could harm marine life or passing ships, and it's not known yet what kind of impact these masses could have on the ocean floor when they're sunk down there.

But they are believed to be a way to capture CO2 from the air and bury it for centuries in the deep blue sea.

Kelp is seaweed, also called a macro algae.

And kelp is one of the fastest growing things in the world.

It pulls carbon in at the fastest rate of any species in the world.

Running Tide is a ocean-based climate solutions company.

We're trying to use kelp, which is like a natural way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sink it to the deep ocean.

Trees are fantastic, but land-based solutions for carbon removal run into some sort of spatial constraints; we don't have those in the ocean really.

So it's a fantastic place to pursue climate solutions.

The process starts on land in a hatchery in a controlled environment where you can really accelerate the propagation of the kelp seed, and then we put it out into the water.

We have teams working on the biodegradable buoys.

After the kelp grows, the biodegradable buoy will dissolve and lose its buoyancy, and by then, the kelp is so heavy that it sinks to the ocean bottom, sequestering the carbon for 1,000 plus years.

Every chance we get, we like to get out on the boat and have a look.

Do you see the sorus tissue developing anywhere?

3 months ago, we put this kelp in the water, and it's just like a single string of kelp-seeded line.

And 3 months later, you have, like, 1,000 pounds.

There's nothing like, you know, picking up the line and feeling, like, 1,000 pounds of weight on it and just being like, all right, like, we're doing the job, we're getting the work done.

Growing up in a fishing family, I've always been interested in how things want to grow in the ocean, how productive the ocean can be.

Being a surfer, you become very aware of how powerful the ocean is.

So, I think that I was just aware that kelp could be a solution to the carbon crisis.

- How long is that, Rob?　- Only 9 feet.

How do we know that growing this much kelp is not gonna disrupt the ocean ecosystems, like, that's a fantastic question.

It's a question we ask ourselves every day and we're working with some of the best scientists in the world to study and model out what affects this would have.

And if we're gonna have any, like, undue negative effects, like, we're not gonna do it, right?

How do we know that the Kelp is not gonna come back up?

Well, if you sink kelp to the bottom of the deep ocean, say, 12,000 feet, it's under 5,000 pounds of pressure, for instance, just carbon dioxide under that much pressure is actually heavier than water, so gravity works everywhere, all the time, so it stays down.

You know, every industry in the world will have to change how it operates in order to reduce its carbon emissions.

There are a lot of really progressive companies out there that wanna minimize their carbon footprints.

So they'll buy what's called a carbon credit from us, and we'll go remove the carbon for them to offset the carbon they're emitting to run their business.

Hopefully, this turns into, like, a revenue-generating machine for us, because, you know, if we can demonstrate that we can make a profit doing this, then we can pull in more investment and grow the business bigger where we're really making an impact on the climate.

Well, this is a new way to think about an above-ground pool.

It's 115 feet above the ground, a clear plastic box that's 82 feet long and would allow people to swim between 2 apartment complexes in London.

You'll have to live in one of the buildings to enjoy the pool.

And the cheapest two-bedroom unit costs 1.4 million dollars.

But moving through the pool that opens later this month is said to be like swimming and flying at the same time.

It might be private, but it ain't private; you can see right through what they're trying to do.

And while critics might say people there have gone off the deep end, they've still got their heads in the clouds where the air is a little more thin when they get in to swim.

They just can't be afraid of heights or depths to take a plunge while hopefully not taking a plunge, if you know what I'm saying.

Rochester Adams High School gets today's shout-out; it's in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and I'm Carl Azuz for CNN.