CNN 10 11/22/2021 ~ 11/26/2021

Go to cnn.com/cnn10 for the latest video 

Monday, November 22, 2021

California's giant sequoias have stood for thousands of years in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the only place on Earth where they grow naturally. But California's recent fires have put many mature sequoias in danger, with fires from the past two years destroying almost 20% of existing mature sequoias. The National Park Service is taking steps to ensure that fewer fires occur and that the trees, already weakened by drought, are not killed by the fires. NASA will be launching a mission called DART soon. It's objective is to fly to a moonlet called Dimorphos, which orbits the asteroid Didymos, and crash into it. NASA will then measure how much the moonlet moves as a result of the collision, and use that data to potentially protect Earth if a large enough asteroid was every found to be on collision course with the planet.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The city of Lahore, Pakistan ranks among the most polluted cities in the world, frequently battling with the notoriously polluted city of New Delhi for the worst air quality in the world.  There are a number of causes for this, including a multitude of factories, cars using cheap gasoline and engines, and farmers burning their fields to prepare for a new growing season. The residents of Lahore experience many side effects from the smog that hangs constantly in the air, including sore throats resembling those caused by COVID-19. Officials have taken several step to try to remedy the issue, from closing down polluting factories to planting new trees. But the prospect of a blue sky still seems to be far away. There is a lot of buzz around self-driving technologies like those in Tesla cars. But is the technology really ready yet? The answer seems to be no. Driving around regular city streets, cars like the Model 3 have difficulties in situations that are hard to prepare algorithms for. For example, a car and a pedestrian overlapping, hard to see boundaries, etc, and constant intervention is still necessary.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

    Nora Seed had so much potential. She could have been a rock star, an Olympic gold medalist swimmer, a glaciologist, a philosopher, or married her long-time boyfriend. But she did not walk those paths. But in this life, she still lives in her hometown of Bedford, working at a music store, mostly friendless. And her life seems to only get worse. First, she gets laid off because her boss believes she isn't fulfilling her potential. Then, she gets fired from her job teaching piano because she forgot to show up to a lesson. Then, she runs into an old bandmate, still bitter over the break-up that ensued when Nora began having mental issues. When she finally gets home, she finds that her cat has died. Feeling like a failure, she fires off some final social media posts, a sad call to her estranged brother, who also left her after their band broke up, and decides that her time is done.

    But when she wakes up again, it isn't in some post-humous world. Rather, she is in a vast expanse with a building in it - a library. In it, she meets Mrs. Elm, the former school librarian who nurtured her old dream of being a glaciologist. She tells her that Nora is in the Midnight Library, a library that contains the infinite possibilities Nora's life contained, each one caused by a different choice she could have made. She can choose any life to begin at exactly 12 AM on the day that Nora "died" in her root life. While she is in the library, time does not change, and it will stand until Nora finally dies in her root life. Once Nora chooses a life, she will stay here until she feels regrets and doubt about whether she wants to stay there. If that never happens, then she is permanently transplanted into that life, as if she had always been there.

    During her time in the library, Nora goes through many different lives, some of them reversing big decisions, some of them little ones. She even meets other people who are "sliding" through lives. But she can never seem to settle into one before regret sets in - even ones where her life seems like a dream.

    Eventually, she is on the verge of giving up. She is tired of doing this, feeling like an outsider stealing another person's life. And that, ironically, is the solution. Her root life is the one best suited for her, because it is her life - she "writes" it, so to speak. As the library collapses, Mrs. Elm gives her a blank book so that Nora can begin her own story.

    She returns to the life she had before, exactly the life that she was in the moment she tried to die for the first time, and realizes all the little things she had in her life to be grateful for, that her life has meaning.