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CARL AZUZ: Welcome to the show on this Thursday February 24.
I'm Carl Azuz bringing your objective overview
of current events.
The US Supreme Court is our first topic.
President Joe Biden has reportedly
met with three potential nominees to the high court.
And by next Monday, he's planning
to announce his choice for the court's next associate justice.
On our January 28 show, which you can find in our YouTube
archives, we explored some of the likely frontrunners
for President Biden's nomination.
He's expected to follow through on a campaign
promise he made to nominate the first Black woman
to the Supreme Court.
If she's confirmed, it would be a historic appointment,
though an ABC Ipsos poll conducted last month
found that most Americans wanted the president to consider
all possible nominees.
Whoever is nominated will still have to be confirmed.
And whoever gets confirmed will be
replacing 83-year-old associate Justice
Stephen Breyer, who's retiring.
Justice Breyer began his term on the high court in 1994
after his nomination by then-president Bill Clinton.
There's no limit to how long justices can serve.
The US Constitution says they can hold their office
during quote, "good behavior".
But democrats have pressured Justice Breyer
to retire during this term.
Why?
The timing of these nominations matters a great deal
to America's political parties.
Republicans generally want to seat conservative justices
on the Supreme Court.
Democrats generally want to see liberal justices.
Six of the current Supreme Court members
were appointed by republican presidents.
Three were appointed by democratic presidents.
Those include Justice Breyer.
So President Biden and his fellow democrats
who control the Senate by the slimmest of margins
want to try to get Breyer's replacement
confirmed this year because the midterm elections in November
could change the political makeup of the Senate.
If republicans win back control of that chamber,
it could make it harder for President Biden to get
a liberal justice confirmed.
CNN 10 contributor Rachel Janfaza
has more on this process.
RACHEL JANFAZA: Now that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
has decided to retire, President Joe Biden
will nominate his successor.
But just because Biden nominates a successor
does not mean that his pick will automatically
be confirmed to the highest bench in the land.
The Constitution does not require that the candidate
is a judge, or even a lawyer.
But that's been the case in recent history.
Once Biden announces his pick, the confirmation process
heads over to the Senate, where there will be hearings
over the candidate in the Senate Judiciary
Committee ahead of a Senate vote over whether
or not to confirm the nominee.
That vote, requires a simple majority of 51 senators.
If it's a 50-50 split, Vice President Kamala Harris
could break the tie.
You might be wondering, how long does this process take?
Well, there's no clear answer to that question.
It really depends.
Usually, it takes months.
But when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020,
former President Donald Trump and Senate republicans
confirmed now Justice Amy Coney Barrett in less than a month.
So time will tell.
But with the 2022 midterm elections on the horizon,
Senate democrats will likely look
to follow a quick timeline towards confirmation while they
have the Senate majority.
CARL AZUZ: 10 second trivia.
What accounts for more than 99% of the mass
in our solar system, the planets,
the sun, carbon, or oxygen?
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Believed to be composed mainly of hydrogen and helium,
the sun holds the vast majority of our solar system's mass.
And that's our first stop in a trio of stories about science.
We're going to start with something far away
and work our way in.
The sun at a distance of about 93 million miles, give or take,
recently had an eruption that just happened
to have been caught on camera.
Scientists say this was a highly energetic explosion of light,
solar material, and energy that occurred earlier this month.
And thankfully, it was traveling in a different direction
than Earth.
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A little closer to home, when Mars and the Earth
get near each other, they're only
about 34 million miles apart.
And NASA currently has a rover that recently
marked its first anniversary of when
it landed on the red planet.
Perseverance has been slowly moving around, taking photos,
collecting martian rocks, testing
out its drone helicopter, and oxygen generator technology.
The estimated cost of this mission
is more than $2.7 billion.
And it's one of six active missions
that NASA currently has on and around the red planet.
- Mars.
Its blood red color inspired the Romans to name
it after their god of war.
The ancient Egyptians called it The Red One, the Chinese,
Firestar.
Now with NASA aiming to send humans
to the planet in the 2030s, the question many have is, why?
Mars has no known resources that would be valuable enough
to send back to Earth.
It's bombarded by solar radiation
and has dust storms that cover the entire planet, which raises
the question why governments and private enterprise
are spending billions of dollars on getting there.
Perhaps the most intriguing reason is the search
for extraterrestrial life.
In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft
to successfully land on Mars.
On board was apparatus designed to detect life.
Chemical soil tests were initially promising.
But doubts were raised.
And it has since been discounted that life
was discovered by Viking 1.
Yet, it still supercharged the debate
on whether there was life beyond our planet
and what it means for our place in the universe.
Conditions on Mars indicate life could have existed.
And in 2018, NASA's Curiosity Rover found organic matter
like methane in rocks.
JENNIFER EIGENBRODE: Organic molecules
could be the food for life, or they
could be the product of life.
Or maybe they're from something altogether
different such as geology or meteorites
that were deposited into the lake.
- NASA's Perseverance Rover, which touched down
on the red planet February 2021, is actively
testing for signs of life too.
Perseverance Rover is just the latest in a series of missions
to Mars that spans decades.
And each new step towards the red planet
has brought the potential for a better
understanding of our own.
There may not be a lot on Mars, but it's
the unknown and the adventure of getting there that
might just merit the price tag.
CARL AZUZ: Bringing things right back down to Earth,
one of the most active volcanoes on our planet is at it again.
We're talking about Mount Etna, the highest
active volcano in Europe.
It does this a lot.
Etna is located on the eastern part of the Italian island
of Sicily.
Shout out to Mr. McCarthy's class who's watching there.
And the blast from Mount Etna earlier this week
sent a volcanic ash cloud about 7 and 1/2 miles into the air.
This is according to Italy's Institute
of Geophysics and Volcanology.
The lava fountain that shot from the mountain
was visible in hues of red and crimson for several hours.
And the Catania Airport, which is located about 20 miles away,
had to shut down for a while because ash is
bad news for airplane engines.
It can melt inside them and cause catastrophic damage.
Etna's eruptions can and have caused
damage to nearby property.
But Italian officials don't consider
the volcano a direct threat to the people
who live in the region.
It has been in the past though.
In 1669, Etna erupted violently over a period of four months.
It destroyed nearby villages and buried
the western part of Catania.
And according to Encyclopedia Britannica,
a trench that workers there dug during the eruption
might have been the first ever human attempt
to redirect the flow of lava.
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One really sweet story rates a 10 out of 10 today.
How many M&Ms can you stack one on top of the other?
For 22-year-old Brendan Kelby of Queensland, Australia,
the answer is six.
That might not sound like a lot, but it is a world record.
No one on the planet has proven to Guinness that they
can stack more than six.
These have to be just regular milk chocolate M&Ms.
And they've got to stay stacked for at least 10 seconds.
Now I don't mean to be Ruth, baby,
but some might snicker calling that record a dud he
milked for all it was worthers.
But he's an original, starbursting
with mounds of grand ideas that bring
him good and plenty Almond Joy.
As long as he keeps kit-catching records and doesn't get,
whatchamacallit, Butterfingers.
I'm Carl Azuz.
From the town of Keenesburg, Colorado,
we've got the rebels of Weld Central
High School watching today.
Thank you for your request on our YouTube channel.
Please join us again on Friday.
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