As the world struggles to deal with the climate crisis, some companies are working to remove polluting carbon dioxide from the air. That's a huge and challenging goal, but two US companies have recently made important progress.
Published in “US”
Last Wednesday, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a four-hour meeting near San Francisco, California. The meeting was aimed at improving the relationship between the two countries, which has been getting worse in recent years.
For nearly four months, TV and movie actors in the US have been on strike. Last Wednesday, the actors union reached a deal with the studios that make TV shows and movies, bringing the strike to an end. The union got much of what it was asking for, but not everything.
Yesterday, the National Zoo in Washington, DC said goodbye to its giant pandas, as they left for China. It's the first time the zoo hasn't had pandas in 23 years, and it may mark the end of a 50-year program. The pandas will be greatly missed by the zoo and its visitors.
In October, Mediterranean fruit flies were discovered in an area of Los Angeles. California is a big farming state, and this was serious news for farmers. The solution to the problem may seem a little unusual: releasing millions more of the flies.
Paul Durietz is a 76-year-old social studies teacher from Illinois. On September 1, he set a Guinness World Record for the world's longest teaching career. Mr. Durietz has been teaching for 53 years - since he was 23 years old.
Roughly 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Now a group of scientists is working to decode one of the great mysteries of that time - the scrolls of Herculaneum.
The US House of Representatives hasn't had an official leader since Speaker Kevin McCarthy was forced out three weeks ago. Without a leader, the House cannot run. But Republicans are so divided that so far, it has been impossible for them to agree on a leader.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman - two scientists whose work led to the development of mRNA vaccines. Their ideas about mRNA were a huge scientific breakthrough, and saved millions of lives during the coronavirus pandemic.
On Sunday, the Writers Guild of America reached a deal with Hollywood's top studios that has ended a 5-month strike by union writers. The strike, which has led to a major slowdown in the entertainment business, officially ended at 12:01 Wednesday morning.
On Sunday, a capsule carrying samples of a distant asteroid landed safely in the desert in Utah. The samples, collected by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, are the largest amount of asteroid material ever returned to Earth.