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COY WIRE: Hello, sunshine.
Can you believe it's already November 1?
It feels like just yesterday, it was October.
I hope you had a fantastic Halloween.
I posted our family fun on Instagram,
Snapchat, and TikTok.
I'm @coywire.
This is "CNN 10."
We've got a lot to get to, but not a lot of time to do it,
so let's get to it.
Considering race in college admissions.
That's our first subject today.
The US Supreme Court met on Monday
to consider whether colleges and universities can
continue to take race into consideration
in their admissions process.
In the past, the US Supreme Court
has ruled that race can be considered during the college
admissions process as part of affirmative action,
an active effort to improve educational or employment
opportunities for members of minority groups and for women.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions,
which opposes affirmative action,
is suing Harvard University and the University
of North Carolina.
It says the universities discriminate
against Asian-American applicants
and unfairly favor African-Americans and Hispanic
Americans.
Effectively, they argue that highly qualified students are
being denied admission in favor of students
of different ethnicities, even though those students' grades
and resumes aren't as outstanding.
These universities say that that's not the case
and that they consider race only to help certain applicants,
not to count against any others.
And they say they need to do this in order
to reach its educational goals, which include
having diverse campuses.
The case is significant because it
could influence how schools recruit and admit
students in the future.
More now from CNN's Jessica Schneider
as we look at the different perspectives
involved in this case.
CALVIN YANG: Diversity, as important as it is, cannot come
at expense of Asian-Americans.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: These Asian-American students
are leading a fight against affirmative action.
They're at the center of a lawsuit
against Harvard, accusing the Ivy League school
of discriminating against Asian-Americans to make more
room for Hispanics and Blacks.
Calvin Yang, who's now a sophomore at UC Berkeley,
claims he was denied admission to Harvard because of his race.
CALVIN YANG: It goes to show that there is a trend here,
a trend where Asian-Americans are
systematically getting discriminated
because of who we are.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Now the case against Harvard
and a separate but related suit against UNC Chapel Hill
is coming before the Supreme Court.
EDWARD BLUM: The current law--
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Conservative activist Edward Blum
has been leading the crusade to end affirmative action
for nearly a decade.
EDWARD BLUM: Classifying students by race and ethnicity,
treating them differently because of their race
and ethnicity, it's unfair.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Bloom started the group Students
for Fair Admissions and initiated cases against Harvard
and UNC Chapel Hill years ago.
Harvard is accused of holding Asian-Americans
to a higher standard and capping their numbers.
But the school says it sets no limits.
At UNC Chapel Hill, some students
say there's too much weight on race in admissions,
resulting in discrimination against whites
and Asian-Americans.
The school, though, contends it takes a holistic approach
to admissions decisions.
Multiple federal judges have ruled neither school has
violated the Constitution by considering
race in the admissions process.
But now Bloom and his supporters are banking on the Supreme
Court reversing its own precedent
and banning the use of affirmative action.
EDWARD BLUM: I think that is something
that has been polarizing.
It has been problematic.
And I think the nation is ready for this.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Julia Clark leads the group Black Student
Movement at UNC, and she says race is an essential element
for universities to consider.
JULIA CLARK: We cannot have holistic admissions without
race because race is embedded into every single facet
of everyday life for people that come from diverse backgrounds.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Already, nine states
ban the use of affirmative action in admissions decisions
at public universities.
But leaders at the University of California
and the University of Michigan say
their race-neutral admissions policies have not
worked, telling the Supreme Court in filings they haven't
been able to significantly increase enrollment
of underrepresented minorities since affirmative action bans
in their states took effect.
MARILYNN SCHUYLER: I know that certainly in California, there
have been definite attempts to try
and even the playing field in other ways.
And they've had a limited impact.
There's a chilling effect.
When students don't feel welcome,
either by legislation or otherwise, they're
not going to want to come to a university that
has banned affirmative action, that
doesn't value that diversity.
JESSICA SCHNEIDER: Now it's up to the Supreme Court
to set the final word of whether affirmative action can
continue.
CALVIN YANG: I want to see affirmative action being
repealed and become illegal in college admissions
system across this country.
JULIA CLARK: I think I speak for myself and other Black students
that we really are scared at the end of the day.
COY WIRE: 10-second trivia.
The Sun Doong cave, considered to be the world's largest,
is located in what country?
Vietnam, Slovenia, China, or Mexico?
The Sun Doong cave is located in Central Vietnam
and is considered the largest cave in the world
based on volume.
Caves.
They are dark.
They're potentially dangerous.
But for one veteran explorer, caves
are full of precious geological secrets that hold
clues about the Earth's past.
Today, as part of our call to Earth coverage
this week, Rolex Awards Laureate Gina Moseley
takes us underground to explore how
million-year-old mineral deposits can provide
insight into the future.
GINA MOSELEY: Caves are really unique places that
are very well-connected to the surface
but also well-protected from the surface.
So this means they can store records
of how the climate has changed in the past
over millions of years.
I think, for me, the best part of being in a cave
is getting to see this unique world that most
people don't get to see.
I'm Gina Moseley, and I'm a professor of paleoclimatology
at the University of Innsbruck.
I first started caving when I was about 12 years old.
I just thought, this is such a cool sport.
And then we went underground into this cave.
I was just absolutely hooked from that first moment,
the adventure of, like, crawling through little, tight passages
and finding out what's around the next corner.
But also, as time went by, I learnt that
you could do science in caves.
I learned that you could be the first person
to see a part of this planet that nobody has ever seen.
Paleoclimatology is the study of climate change in the past.
I'm looking for samples of calcite in the cave.
So this is a mineral deposit that forms
from water that enters a cave.
And this brings with it a chemical signature
of what the climate and the environment
is doing on the surface.
And this water deposits, layer by layer,
these layers of calcite.
And a thin sheet of water like this will lead to a formation
that we find in a cave called flowstone.
And this is a very nice example of a flowstone
here on the floor.
And then I take a sample of that to find out when, in the past,
the climate has been warmer and wetter there.
And that can inform us about what we could
expect to happen in the future.
I've led three expeditions to Greenland so far.
We're going this summer.
So that means there's 24-hour daylight.
The conditions are fairly rudimentary.
It's like being on Mars in some ways
because this is a polar desert.
Each expedition takes several years to prepare for.
The next expedition to Greenland is in 2023.
I'm taking a team to the very north of Greenland.
But we don't know what we'll find,
which makes it kind of high-risk but high-gain.
Also makes that exciting.
I collected a whole bunch of flowstones
from Northeast Greenland.
And these all formed at times in the past
when it was warmer and wetter than today.
I've got some dates that are, like, one and a half million
years old on some samples.
And I can analyze the chemistry in each layer.
It's a bit like looking at tree rings.
Each layer tells a different story and a different history
about what the climate and the environment
was doing at the time.
So climate modelers might take our results from Greenland
and implement that into a part of their climate model
so we can start to build up a picture of what we could
expect to happen in the future.
Today's story getting a 10 out of 10
in my book, a robotic falcon, and not because I
played for the Atlanta Falcons, currently
leading their division.
It's because these falcons are keeping the friendly skies
safe for high flyers.
Since 1903, birds and airplanes have been sharing the sky,
and collisions, known as bird strikes,
have resulted in aircraft damage,
delays, cancellations, and harm to the birds, of course.
But this robotic peregrine falcon,
developed in the Netherlands, could be the solution.
There's a camera on its head, allowing for a first-person
view for the pilot on the ground, who chases
the real birds away to safety.
Who else wants that job?
All right, lovely people.
Favorite part of the day.
Shout out to Central High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
We hope you and everyone watching around the world
have a wonderful one.
Go out and do the little things that make this world
a bit of a better place.
I'm Coy, and this is CNN.
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