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COY WIRE: Hello, lovely people.
It's Thursday, so Happy Friday Eve.
It's your boy Coy, a.k.a.
Mr. Clean.
Let's aim to be a little better today than we were yesterday,
and we can start by fueling our minds right here on "CNN 10."
First up, the inflation situation.
Headline is inflation surged in January and by the most
we'd seen in three months.
As a reminder, inflation is a rise in prices and decline
in the ability to purchase.
It's like if someone gives you $20, you go to the movies.
But the cost of a movie ticket is now $17,
and last year it was only 15 for a movie at your local theater.
Rising inflation means that your $20 just won't
get you as much as it used to.
But despite the fact that inflation costs
grew this month, they've continued to slow for the year
overall.
But economists are bracing for uncertainty,
and it seems like no one, not even the experts,
have any clue what's going to happen next.
And part of this is because so many factors contribute
to what makes up inflation.
All economists know is that inflation has changed household
budgets and altered American spending
habits, especially in terms of discretionary spending.
That means extra money to spend on entertainment, eating out,
and travel.
We'll hear now from CNN business and politics correspondent
Vanessa Yurkevich, who has more on what's
happening in the market.
VANESSA YURKEVICH: It's been a bumpy road to cool inflation
and a longer road than many Americans would like to see.
But some good news, year-over-year inflation
cooled to 6.4%, falling for seven straight months.
But inflation in January rose 0.5%.
And inflation and the economy have been
key issues for President Biden.
And coming off this report, he said that it is good news,
but there is still work to do as inflation remains too high.
So the biggest inflation drivers were energy costs,
which includes gas, up 1.5% from a year ago,
shelter, which contributed to nearly half the increase
last month, that rose 7.9% year over year, and food costs,
remaining extremely high, up 10.1% year over year.
Some key items at the grocery store
costing more-- eggs up 70%, butter up 26.3%,
and lettuce up 17.2% year over year.
But you'll see some savings on a couple
items at the grocery store.
Beef, veal, and bacon, all down year over year.
So how does this translate to Americans' budgets?
Well, according to Moody's analytics,
families are spending nearly $400 more a month
this year than they did last year
on the same goods and services because of inflation.
So this signals that there is still work
for the Federal Reserve to do.
We can expect continued interest rate
hikes to try to bring down inflation in the months
to come.
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COY WIRE: 10-second trivia, which of these words
comes from a Latin term meaning to send out?
Edify, embody, emit, or encompass?
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Meaning to throw or give off, emit is your answer here.
It's derived from the Latin word "emittere."
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Up next, we're going meet a climate
scientist who's been researching and tracking dust for decades.
That's right, dust.
She tells us that those tiny particulates can essentially
create change of Brobdingnagian proportions across the globe.
The company SpaceX just launched with EMIT
on board, a special instrument from NASA that
will help scientists learn more about how dust
is affecting our atmosphere.
CNN meteorologist Allison Chinchar
shows us how we're going to learn more about dust
from space.
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ALLISON CHINCHAR: In July 2022, this SpaceX
rocket launched with a new NASA instrument,
called EMIT, on board.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: Well, EMIT is going to revolutionize
what we can do.
So it's just going to provide such amazing new data
to help us understand the surface and the atmosphere.
ALLISON CHINCHAR: Now, over 250 miles above the Earth,
attached to the International Space Station,
its purpose is to shed light on an important weather
phenomenon, dust.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: Desert dust or mineral
aerosols is a mineral soil particle that's
suspended in the atmosphere.
And so these come out mostly from desert
regions that are dry and unvegetated with strong winds.
ALLISON CHINCHAR: For over two decades,
climate scientist Natalie Mahowald
has been tracking dust across the globe
and how it impacts climate change.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: I love looking at a globe
and thinking about how dust is getting from one place
to another.
ALLISON CHINCHAR: She's been working with NASA
on this new instrument to find out
how different colors of dust in the atmosphere
can heat or cool the planet.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: So different soils actually
have really different colors.
So the white ones reflect the incoming solar radiation,
and the red ones and the dark ones absorb it.
And so one of the problems we have in understanding
the impact of desert dust is we don't
know the composition very well.
ALLISON CHINCHAR: Using a device called an imaging spectrometer,
EMIT scans the Earth's arid regions
to detect different colored soils, creating a mineral map.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: Already EMIT has taken millions or billions
of observations of what's going on in the arid regions in terms
of the composition, and then we can
use that to put into our models to better
understand what actually the impact of the desert dust is.
ALLISON CHINCHAR: Dust and sandstorms have dramatically
increased in recent years due to climate
change, land degradation, and drought, according to the UN.
These storms are causing respiratory illnesses,
damaging livestock, disrupting transport,
and even melting Arctic ice.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: We've also watched dust plumes really just
travel across oceans and be deposited in Greenland or even
in the Alps.
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ALLISON CHINCHAR: EMIT can also detect
another factor impacting climate change, methane,
a potent greenhouse gas.
It's detected 50 super-emitters across the world,
mostly coming from fossil fuel, landfill,
and agricultural facilities.
NASA hopes this knowledge can help countries
stand the emissions and shine a spotlight
on how our planet is changing.
NATALIE MAHOWALD: So you can think of the EMIT project
as really testing the waters and really
showing what is possible.
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COY WIRE: And for today's story getting a 10
out of 10, the ghost yacht.
A 53-foot ship sat eerily abandoned in a Marina
at Kent Narrows, Maryland for decades.
It was nicknamed the "ghost yacht,"
but now the mysterious yacht is being reimagined.
The state's artificial reef program sunk the vessel
to the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay
this past week as one of Maryland's 21 artificial reefs.
The hope is that it'll become a habitat for all sorts of fish
and underwater creatures and provide
an underwater treasure for scuba divers, kind
of like a sunken pirate ship.
All right, dad joke alert.
What did the pirate say when he turned 80?
I'm 80.
[CHUCKLES]
I want to give a special salute to all of you
lovely people who made a hashtag #YourWordWednesday submission.
Thanks to the likes of @LawrenceSandraSRQ.
Today's word was "Brobdingnagian," if you didn't
notice, which means gigantic.
And we want to give a Brobdingnagian
shout out to Woodbridge Middle School
in Bridgeville, Delaware.
Rise up.
Have an awesome day lovely people, or maybe awe-a-lot day.
I'm Coy Wire, and we are "CNN 10."
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