Tom: Hey guys. Today, student scientistsstudying the eclipse, plus a new generation of girls in a league of their own.I am Tom Hanson, and Channel One News starts right now.
Something is going wrong on U.S.Navy ships. Four times this year,Navy ships have crashed into other ships.Now the Navy is hitting the pause button, telling its ships to take a break from the high seas until it figures out what is going on.
The USSJohn S. McCain collided Monday with an oil and chemical tanker as it was passing through the ocean near Singapore. Ten sailors went missing; a search is underway, and some of the bodies have been located.It is the second Navy collision this summer.In June seven sailors died when the USSFitzgerald crashed into a merchant ship near Japan.
Now the Navy is holding off on operations all around the world. It says the pausewill give it time to review basic seamanship and teamwork. But it is also looking into a cyberattack or sabotage as the cause.
Okay now, figuring out what to do in Afghanistan, which isAmerica's longest war,is up to this man, Defense Secretary and head of the military James Mattis. Mattis, along with other advisers, helped convince the president to beef up American troops in Afghanistan, a decision Trump publicly said he didn't like.
As a private citizen, the president criticized the war and tweeted about leaving Afghanistan.He vowed to put America first as commander-in-chiefand get us out of foreign conflicts.But now he is reversing that course.
President Donald Trump: My original instinct was to pull out, and historically,I like following my instincts. But all my life,I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.
Tom: President Obama made a similar pledge when he was running for presidentto get the U.S. out of a very long and unpopular war. In the end he reduced troops significantly, leaving less than 10,000 on the ground.At the height of the war, America had 101,000 troops in Afghanistan.Many military experts say that President Obama's strategy allowed the country to fall back into the hands of extremists, and that is why President Trump is now changing course.
All right, now, Arielle is here, and, Arielle…
Arielle: What?
Tom: I think you are a little late to the party.
Arielle: I mean, these glasses are still on trend, so I say, get with the program, Tom.
Tom: I think the eclipse was on Monday, and you can’t even see anything out of those.
Arielle: Okay. You have a valid point there. But people are still talking about the stellar show, and that is not all. Students and scientists across the country used the celestial opportunity to gather info and study the sun.
Elliott: I think we just need to tilt this away from the sun and put our solar lens on so that the camera doesn't get fried.
Arielle: It only lasted two minutes and 27 seconds, but for these students from Montana, it was worth the 10-hour drive to the abandoned town of Jay Em, Wyoming.
Janet Jorgensen: It's just an amazing opportunity for the kids because this is real-life science, and it helps them be exposed to what kind of opportunities there might be in the future.
Arielle: These students are one of 68 teams nationwide who participated in an amateur scientist experiment called Citizen CATE, volunteers with an extraordinary mission.
Elliott: We're trying to get pictures of the solar eclipse so we can study the corona, which is the light that comes on the edges. There are, like, solar flares and stuff that come off the sun that you can really only study when there's an eclipse.
Arielle: Matt Penn is the project's director. His team at Tucson's National Solar Observatory provided the volunteers with equipment and instructions for the astronomical undertaking.
Matt Penn: If the network works perfectly, we'll get 30 times the data of previous studies. Even if we have 50-percent participation, we'll get 10 times the amount of data, so it's going to be a big improvement, either way.
Arielle: When the eclipse began, they just pressed go, and the computer did the rest, capturing images like this so-called diamond-ring effect.
The eclipse was also a rare chance for NASA to learn more about the sun from up above, using planes with telescopic cameras to capture more than 29,000 photographs as the sun and moon moved into totality. To do it, NASA pilots traced the eclipse shadow path at 50,000 feet above Missouri, Illinois, Kentuckyand Tennessee.
Amir; They were able to chase a solar eclipse going 450 miles an hour, spaced 70 miles apart, and they hit their marks within seconds of one another so that we could get seven and a half minutes of totality, compared to only two minutes, 40 seconds for someone standing on the ground.
Arielle: NASA's Stratospheric Airborne Science team hopes to learn about how energy is transferred from inside of the sun to its hotter outer corona.
Amir: Our results will lead to a better understanding of the corona, which will eventually lead to a better understanding of flares and coronal mass ejections.
Arielle: Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are explosions on the sun that send massive amounts of energy or particles toward Earth, which can mess with radio frequencies, electric grids, cellphones and GPS. So, with the pros in the air and amateurs on the ground, these scientists collected a ton of information on Monday while taking in a sight that will stay with them for a lifetime.
Alexus: It was just something you don’t forget, I guess. It was just really pretty.
Arielle: And who knows? Their discoverycould make them into the next science rock star, kind of like this guy, Albert Einstein. In 1915, before he was a famous scientist, he argued that what we understand as gravity is the curvature of space and time.
Not many people believed him, but then came the solar eclipse of 1919, and boom — seeing the light bend during an eclipse exactly how Einstein predicted turned him into a science superstar. Newspapers around the world celebrated his accomplishment.
Tom: And there you have it. Pretty cool. And if you are feeling inspired, we have more stories about future scientists over at ChannelOne.com.
Okay, next up, girls in a league of their own.
Tom: It is time for Words in the News, a new segment where we highlight a wordyou might be hearing tossed around in the news a lot.And today's word is generation gap: a difference of attitudes between people of different generations, leading to a lack of understanding.And I am sure many of you can relate to that.
Now, in our next story, women are reaching across a generation gap to continue a legacy of breaking gender barriers in sports.Emily Reppert hit the diamond to check out the unlikely tale of women stepping up to the plate.
Emily: Okay, when you think of baseball greats, guys like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson probably come to mind because, when it comes to women making history in this sport — well, there is still work to do. In fact, only about 1,000 of the 100,000 girls that play youth baseballgo on to play at the high school level. But now a group called Baseball for All is working to prove baseball isn't just for the boys.
At Beyer Stadium in Rockford, Illinois, sports history was made over the summer.Two hundred girls aged 7 to 17 came here for the largest girls-only baseball tournament in U.S. history.
Fifteen-year-old Kendra Levesque plays third base.
Kendra Levesque: Other girls know what it's like to be a girl playing baseball on an all-boys team back home, and they know the extra work they have to put in to be as good as or better than these boys.
Justine Siegal: I love this game — it's the greatest game on Earth.
Emily: Justine Siegal is the tournament organizer and founder of Baseball for All, a group whose mission is to empower girls through baseball.
Tom Hanks: There's no crying in baseball!
Emily: Siegal, who grew up playing baseball, says she realized she wasn't alone when she first saw the movie "ALeague of Their Own."The 1992 film was about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Baseball execs created the league during the Second World War while many Major League players were off fighting overseas. Ninety-year-old Maybelle Blair and eighty-four-year-old Shirley Burkovich once played for the all-girls league.
Maybelle Blair: We'll never have any Babe Ruths in the Major Leagues, and we don't expect to. All we want to do is have a chance to play our own game.
Emily: They have traveled to Rockford to connect with girls like Kendra who, despite the generation gap, share the same dream they once had — to play ball at the professional level.
Kendra: And a lot of people don't think girls could play baseball, so you just got to accept that they don't think you can play and just go and show them differently on the ballfield.
Emily: Emily Reppert, Channel One News.
Tom: Cool story.
All right, that is all the time we have today. We will see you tomorrow.
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