Happy New Year.

Hope your 2024 is off to an epic start.

I'm Coy Wire. This is CNN 10 and we are so grateful that you choose to spend part of your day with us.

This is gonna be a big year.

We have the US presidential election in November.

We have the Summer Olympics in Paris.

We have a solar eclipse taking place in April and it's a leap year.

We get an extra day in February, so that means we get 366 days to make this year great.

Let's get this show on the road.

Mother Nature starting 2024 in full force.

A powerful winter storm is making its presence felt throughout the nation, bringing all sorts of wintry mix, including heavy snowfall, freezing rain and gusty winds.

The size of this storm ranges from the southwester part of the US to the northeast where more than 30 states are impacted.

More than 35 million people were under winter storm alerts over the weekend and traveling was treacherous, especially in the northeast as state officials advised commuters to avoid unnecessary travel.

The plains region of the US is expected to see strong winds that could bring wind chill values below zero degrees flooding, even tornadoes may be a concern for the Gulf Coast area.

The Times Square ball drop is a Hallmark of New Year's Eve.

One minute before January 1st, the sparkling ball begins its descent.

The ball drop has taken place annually since 1907.

It was halted for two years during World War II, but crowds still flocked to Times Square.

Until 1995, the ball drop was managed by the family company of its first creator Jacob Starr.

Since then, there have been many makeovers of the famous ball, including crystals, grindstones and strobe lighting.

Whether this enduring ritual has the audience a few or many, it always marks the end of the old and beginning of the new.

10-Second Trivia.

Scientists name Antarctic icebergs based on what? Their size above the surface, size below the surface, their shape or location of first sighting?

The US National Ice Center assigns names to these icebergs based on where they are first cited and then the order in which they are cited.

The world's largest iceberg is named A23a, it was the 23rd iceberg cited in the A quadrant of Antarctica.

The continent is divided into A, B, C, and D quadrants. Did you know?

Recently scientists studied A23a as it recently started drifting around the Antarctic peninsula again.

This iceberg is about three times the size of New York City, weighing nearly a trillion tons.

CNN spoke with the Antarctic Survey team about this force of nature and where it might be headed next.

Antarctic scientist had a quote unique opportunity to observe the world's largest iceberg, three times the size of New York City.

The iceberg broke away from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf more than 30 years ago, but it stayed grounded on the Antarctic's wet sea and only started moving recently.

Now, it's drifting around the Antarctic peninsula.

The research team on the RRS Sir David Attenborough, cross paths with the iceberg early December.

I was just incredibly excited to see it.

It's really quite staggering uh in scale.

If you're up against it, it almost just looks like land.

It has these big towering ice cliffs. You know, you're stretching sort of, as far as the eye can see in both directions.

As the iceberg moves north into warmer waters, it's gradually melting and producing melt water into the ocean.

Scientists took water samples around the iceberg to try to understand the impacts it may have on the physical circulation and nutrients of the ocean.

We know that large icebergs like this have the potential to bring a large amount of mineral dusts from the continent into the operation.

And many of the ecosystems in the operation are limited by the amount of nutrients that are available.

So they can act as big sources of, of nutrients and, you know, impacts near surface productivity that ultimately sustains the -- the ecosystems of the -- of the southern nation.

Experts believe the iceberg will likely discharge into the Scotia Sea and end up close to the South Georgia Island.

American shoppers spent a record $222 billion online this past holiday season.

But let's be honest, not all those purchases are keepers. If you know what I mean?

Maybe that sweater that your auntie got you doesn't quite make the cut.

So you send it back.

Now, many companies offer free returns, right?

But those returns might not go where you may think they'd go.

CNN's Peter Valdez de Pena explains.

Fee returns. Their customers' insurance policy for shopping online, but what happens to those returns after you give them back might surprise you.

So customers really believe that the product just goes into the black hole or ends up being resold to another customer. In many instances, that's not the case.

In reality, many of these products never return anywhere.

Instead, they may end up here or even here.

You know, easily 25% of all these returns get destroyed.

In fact, returns have become such a headache for retailers that in some cases, they're just refunding customers and letting them keep or donate the unwanted items.

The cost of getting the product back from the customer is much higher than traditional logistics, getting the product to the customer.

Turns out, free returns are far from it.

There's a very large disparity between the amount of returns that happen from consumers that buy products online versus in the store.

In a brick and mortar store, we typically get somewhere between five and 10% returns.

But online, we get north of 30% returns.

Accepting a return isn't always easy either.

A warehouse optimized for fulfilling orders now has to receive a product and inspect it.

Then someone needs to decide whether it can be resold or not.

In the end, an online return can require up to 20% more space and labor than one made in store.

Those costs are part of why Toro a return solution company estimates that returning a $50 item can cost a retailer 59% of its sale price.

Often the math just doesn't add up.

So this is a product that came in one of these pallets. - Liquidators like this one are the middlemen between retailers and resellers.

We sort organized process and figure out methods to get them to the right home.

And that's, that's really what we do here.

They buy a return merchandise then sort and evaluate it before auctioning it to discount stores and authorized resellers.

You'd be able to resell them at a profit because you would be purchasing them at a real fraction of what the actual cost is.

But some returns never make it to a liquidator products.

Ending up in landfills.

Customers don't really even think of that as part of the purchase process every year returns produce an estimated £5 billion of waste in landfills.

It's generally risky to remind consumers how potentially wasteful their consumerism is.

So in general, retailers are hesitant to lean too heavily into those kind of awareness campaigns.

In an odd way, this is a partially self correcting problem as the return problem gets bigger for all these retailers.

There's more financial resources available to fix the problem.

So there's a happy outcome where less of this stuff ends up in a landfill just because there's more money to be made by keeping it out of the landfill.

For today's story getting a 10 out of 10, the 13-year-old from Stillwater, Oklahoma who beat the game of Tetris into submission.

Oh my God.

That's Willis Gibson in total disbelief as he pulled off the nearly impossible, beating, so to speak, the iconic video game Tetris.

It took him about 38 minutes.

The Tetris Titan is the first human gamer ever to reach level 157.

The other player to reach at least this level was artificial intelligence.

After reaching this rare threshold, the game glitched and hit its kill screen.

Here's the Tetris company chairman explaining why.

You can tell by, you know, this kid that broke the game that he went into an area of memory of the computer memory that the programmer never envisioned they would end up in.

And that's why the program crashed.

Shout out to Willis for accomplishing the nearly unthinkable.

It's also time to shout out you.

Our first of the year, this one goes to Winner Middle School inWinner, South Dakota.

I see you, warriors.

And this one goes to, The lions, the mighty lions of Brindlee Mountain High School in Guntersville, Alabama.

Rise up.

Thank you for subscribing and commenting on our CNN 10 youtube channel.

I'm headed to Houston y'all.

We're gonna be there for the college football championship game and we're taking you to NASA Space Center to get a tour from an astronaut.

So send us any questions you may have for them.

I'm @CoyWire on social, and we are CNN 10.