Hello and welcome to CNN 10. I'm Koi
Wire. Happy Friday Eve. It's Thursday,
May 1st. Feels like just yesterday it
was April. This year is flying by. It is
also feeling like a Thinker Thursday.
So, put your thinking caps on. What
starts with a P and ends with an E and
has thousands of letters? No, it's not
the longest English word in the
dictionary. Nunommano
electromeicroscopic silicico volcano
coniosis the lung disease because that
ends with an s and only has 45 letters.
Answer is post office. All right, got
those mental muscles working. Now let's
get you your news. We start today with
the US economy. The commerce
department's Bureau of Economic Analysis
just released its advanced estimate for
gross domestic product or GDP for the
first quarter or first three months of
the year. Think of it like the country's
financial health report. GDP measures
all the goods and services produced in
the economy. So how did the US economy
score? On the not so positive side, the
economy shrank by.3% for the first time
in three years. US stocks dropped as a
result. Some of the likely reasons there
have been government cutbacks in
spending and imports. Items purchased
from other countries skyrocketed from
minus 1.9% to
41.3% in the first quarter. likely
because businesses are stocking up
before new tariffs kick in. You know,
tariffs as in those taxes imposed by a
government on imported goods. Here's the
CEO of Ford Motor Company. It's tough to
tell right now. Um the reason is because
we're seeing doubledigit sales increases
since March and April, but we ran this
employee pricing. I don't know if that's
unique to us. There may be a lot of
customers going out and buying cars, you
know, before what they fear is the
imports increasing prices. That may be a
dynamic we're certainly seeing. Our
inventories are shrinking at the
dealership. On the flip side, it wasn't
all doom and gloom. While consumer
spending slowed sharply in the first
quarter, businesses actually stepped up
their spending. Gross private domestic
investment soared to its highest rate
since 2021. And there was also an
increase in US exports. things other
countries buy from the US. All of these
are typically good signs and not what
firms and businesses do when they're
concerned about the economic outlook.
Now to some severe weather that it's
affecting so many of you in the
Midwestern US. Rounds of heavy rain,
floods, and violent winds have
threatened more than a dozen states this
week. The storm systems so widespread
that a tornado watch was in effect for
nearly 2 million people on Wednesday in
parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.
And more than 10 million people were
under flood watches across five states.
Wind gusts as high as 90 miles per hour
tore across the Midwest bringing massive
hail and tornadoes. Some cities and
communities sustained major damage. For
our future meteorologists out there,
let's catch up with our Derek Vanam to
teach us about dos and a phenomenon
known as training. Hi Derek. Yeah,
that's right Ky. So many people
associate damage with thunderstorms to a
tornado, but that's not what took place
on Tuesday. In fact, what is known as a
do took place. That is a straight line
wind event. And in order for this to be
classified as a do, we need this
destructive line of thunderstorms to
move over several hundred miles. And it
produces winds over 58 mph. And that's
exactly what it did. You can basically
follow this thing uh stretching from the
Ozarks right through the interior of New
England and the Ohio River Valley. And
it really knocked out power for so many
people. You can see this radar loop just
the destructive storms that pressed
through this region. That is, by the
way, hurricane force wind gusts that
were reported with this line of storms
and it knocked out power to over a half
a million customers in and around the
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region. Uh so
we have also seen a line of storms that
have moved over the same locations and
it's produced significant very heavy
rainfall. This is called training of
storms. Look at them move over Oklahoma
City, one after another after another,
producing record-breaking rainfall for
the month of April. It added to the
totals that they've got over the past
several weeks. And just yesterday, uh we
saw an incredible amount of rainfall
from the sky, producing scenes like
this. This is coming out of Norman,
Oklahoma. Uh look at this parking lot
and this uh road turned into a river.
You can see the lightning flashing in
the background as well. Incredible. This
system is going to advance eastward and
then we have the potential for more
severe weather. So we'll keep an eye to
the sky from Cleveland to Indianapolis,
Nashville, Little Rock, all the way to
Austin today. Back to you,
Coy. Now to an update of a story we told
you about on Monday. The NFL has decided
to find the Atlanta Falcons and their
defensive coordinator over the leak of
an NFL draft prospect's phone number.
The football coach's son orchestrated a
prank phone call to the newly named
Cleveland Browns Shadur Sanders during
the NFL draft and it went viral for all
the wrong reasons. Now that single phone
call is costing his father a fine of
$100,000 and the entire Falcons
organization a quarter of a million
bucks. A true testament to the phrase,
"Your actions have
consequences." Pop quiz hot shot. What
planet in our solar system has a
hexagonal cloud pattern located on its
north pole? Jupiter, Saturn, Earth, or
Neptune? Ring ring. This is Saturn
calling. And if you picked me, you are
correct. Scientists discovered a
six-sided cloud pattern during the
Voyager missions in the 1980s and
believe it's the result of a hurricane
that creates a six-sided jetream. Now to
some space news about our solar systems
shining star, the sun. We're getting a
newly released close-up image of the
sun's surface with details we've never
been able to see until now. It's the
first shot taken by the US National
Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inway
Solar Telescope, which has a new visible
tunable filter, or VTF. The filter can
build a three-dimensional view of
activity on the sun's surface with a
closer view than any other instrument.
It just revealed a cluster of
continent-sized dark sunspots near the
center of the sun's inner atmosphere.
Just one pixel of this image covers 6.2
miles of the sun's surface. But the
detailed image isn't just cool to look
at. It's a groundbreaking tool for
scientists to learn about and predict
potentially dangerous solar weather,
like certain events that can cause
geomagnetic storms here on Earth, which
can cause all kinds of electronics and
infrastructure to go ary. Want to become
a farmer in space? Grow some crops among
the stars? Well, you may soon be in
luck. With missions to the moon and Mars
in planning stages for the next decade,
scientists are racing to figure out how
to lighten the loads aboard spacecrafts.
Their most recent mission testing
whether astronauts can grow their own
food in space. Our Nick Valencia shows
us the technology behind it all. Three,
two, one. Europe's first returnable
commercial spacecraft, Phoenix 1,
launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9
rocket last week. One purpose of the
mission to test whether astronauts could
grow all of their own food in space. As
the momentum for space exploration
grows, the attention now turns to the
astronauts. With Mars on the horizon for
sometime in the 2030s, a roundtrip
mission will last about 18 months. This
project is about how we can produce the
food we need if we want to travel in
space, if we want to colonize all the
planets. uh it's really difficult to to
bring everything we need from Earth.
Just think that an astronaut consume
between half a kilo and 1.5 kg of food
per day and every kilogram we ship to
space can be 20,000 uh US. So imagine
every meal can be something like
$10,000.
NASA, the European Space Agency, and
other partner countries have long been
working aboard the space station to
learn how to live in space and growing
some food. Now the Imperial College with
the help of the Basos Earth Fund are
investigating how to create food that
both astronauts and people on Earth can
produce sustainably using bofoundaries
with cells acting as mini factories. The
plan is to use microbes and
microorganisms such as bacteria or
yeast, enabling space crews to grow
their own food, fuel, and even medicine.
If we bring a tiny little cell out in
space, that cells can then grow and
produce everything we need. The team
hopes the mission will reveal whether
the cells can produce the variety of
products they seek, from vitamins to
dairy products to biodiesel. And that's
just the start. But down the line, when
we have the moon base, we need this kind
of bioreactors to be able to really
sustain permanent settlement of human
civilization in this environment. The
team hopes to provide space crews with
the taste of home while out in space and
maybe make some space
pizzas. Today's story getting a 10 out
of 10 is a military salute 80 years
overdue. This week, the only female unit
to serve overseas in World War II was
honored with a Congressional Gold Medal,
the highest civilian award bestowed by
the United States Congress. The
6,888th Central Postal Directory
Battalion known as the 68 was a unit of
black women who tackled a massive US
military mail crisis in England during
the war. They cleared a backlog of
around 17 million pieces of unscent mail
in three months when they were given 6
months to do so. We gather to today to
salute these mighty veterans. We salute
the ingenuity with which they sprang
into battle. We salute the barriers that
they broke in a system designed to push
them aside. We salute their trailblazing
spirit and the road that they paved for
others. For their distinguished service,
I am proud our nation is finally giving
the women of the 68 the recognition
they've long deserved. Today is our way
of saying in no uncertain terms that
their story will never be forgotten.
Their story so powerful, Hollywood took
note. The movie 68 starring Carrie
Washington was released last year. All
right, superstars from the Golden State
to the Lone Star State. We have two
shoutouts today. This one goes to Miss
Olsen and all of our bolts at Thornton
Middle School in Fremont, California.
Rise up. And we're sending a whole bunch
of love to Mrs. Harple and all of our
friends at Creekide Park Junior High in
Tumbal, Texas. I see you, Kylie. Go out
and making it awesome day, everyone.
We'll do it again tomorrow for the last
day of the week. I'm Ky Wire. We are CNN
10.