On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: The map of our DNA is finally complete
Health reporter Karen Weintraub explains what that means for humanity. Plus, at least six people are dead after a Sacramento shooting, the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, travel reporter Bailey Schulz looks ahead to this summer’s rental car market and there’s a new champion in women’s college basketball.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Buenos dias. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 4th of April 2022. Today, mapping the human genome. Plus the latest from a Sacramento mass shooting and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- Germany’s defense minister says Europe must consider ramping up penalties on Russia for boycotting its gas exports. Europe gets 40% of its gas from Russia. Over the weekend Lithuania announced it was stopping Russian gas imports and urged the rest of the region to follow.
- A new report from Human Rights Watch is accusing Russia of war crimes during its invasion of Ukraine. That follows similar claims from Western world leaders.
- And the Grammys are in the books. Jon Batiste won best album while Olivia Rodrigo took home best new artist. You can find all the winners on USATODAY.com.
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Scientists are finally done mapping the human genome. That’s more than two decades after the first draft was completed. Health reporter Karen Weintraub has more on what this means for humanity.
Karen Weintraub:
So we all thought in the early two thousands that they had finished mapping the human genome. The first announcement was that they’d finished a draft and then they’d finished the whole thing. But in truth, they only got 92% and it’s taken them until now to get the last 8%. And the reason involves the technology and the way they were measuring or reading the DNA. They could only read short pieces and then they would use sort of overlapping short pieces to piece together the whole genome. And there are parts that include a lot of repeats. So the genome, the DNA is made up of As, Cs, Ts and Gs and if you had a hundred Gs in a row, you couldn’t see it with a short measurement. So now they can measure a lot longer strands. And so they could see those repeats. So they finally finished the last 8%.
Right now, it’s just scientifically cool that they finally finished it, but the potential is there for understanding diseases and even things like development and aging. These repeats are very involved in when cells divide and split into two identical cells that it’s controlled by the area where all these repeats are. And so they think that they may be able to understand development a little bit better by understanding these regions. And then there are some diseases that are connected to misspellings in these regions. And so now that they can see them, they may be able to identify those misspellings.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find Karen’s full story in today’s episode description.
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At least six people are dead after a shooting rampage in downtown Sacramento, California early Sunday morning, and another 12 were being treated at local hospitals. Sacramento police say there were multiple shooters and that a large fight took place right before the incident. Police Chief Cathy Lester.
Cathy Lester:
Investigators are working to identify those responsible for this horrific act. We know that a large fight took place just prior to the shootings. And we have confirmed that there are multiple shooters. Investigators are currently interviewing numerous witnesses. We have located hundreds of pieces of evidence at the scene. Every one of those we process to help us learn more about this crime. And one of the items that we found was a stolen handgun. We also found that buildings were struck by gunfire during this incident.
Taylor Wilson:
No arrests were initially made and an online portal has been set up for the public to upload evidence. The tragedy appears to be the city’s deadliest shooting in history, according to the Sacramento Bee. It comes a month after five people were killed when a man opened fire at a Sacramento church and killed his three children before killing himself. Sunday’s shooting is also the deadliest in the country so far this year.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee will meet today to vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Before the vote, each of the 11 Republicans and Democrats on the Committee will have unlimited time to offer their recommendations. Some Republicans have announced plans to vote against Jackson, but she’s still widely expected to be confirmed. Republican Senator Susan Collins announced last week that she would support Jackson guaranteeing the nominee bipartisan support. If she confirmed, she’ll become the first black woman ever to serve on the high court.
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The rental car shortage that upended travel plans last summer around the country is far from over. Travel Reporter Bailey Schultz gives us a heads up on what to expect this summer.
Bailey Schultz:
This is something that we have seen for a while at this point. This isn’t really anything new in the rental car industry, but basically that’s a chip shortage that we’ve seen affect car manufacturers is something that is kind of having ripple effects on the car rental companies. So what happened was in the early days of the pandemic, a lot of these rental car companies sold off parts of their fleet just because they were sitting there. They weren’t making any money off of having all these cars, but now travel demand is back and they need these cars again. It’s so much harder at this point in time to just buy new cars. That’s not something that’s easy these days. So because of that, demand is just outpacing supply with the fleets.
So it sounds like things might be tight. I’ve been told that supply is improving as far as the number of cars that these companies are getting, but at the same time, they can only buy these cars at such a pace and we’re seeing leisure demand pick up in the summer . We’re seeing business travel pick up this year. So there’s just going to be so much more competition it sounds like this summer for car rentals.
Sounds like this is something that is expected to affect travelers throughout the summer, if not beyond that. Little hard to predict long term what will happen in the summer of 2023. But at this point, what a lot of experts and people in the industry are advising is to book your reservations early, maybe consider picking up the car at a location that is not connected to an airport so that can give you some better chances. Be flexible at what kind of car you’re renting, if that’s an option. So yeah, it sounds like travelers are going to have to be maybe a little more flexible this summer as they’re renting cars.
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There’s a new champion in women’s college basketball. Overall number one seed South Carolina took down two seed UConn last night, 64 to 49, for the program’s second national title and first since 2017. They did it behind 26 points from Destanni Henderson, the team’s second leading score this season, and 16 rebounds from star Aliyah Boston. Carolina jumped out to a 22-8 lead after the first quarter and a strong UConn second quarter was not enough to turn the tide. It’s head coach Dawn Staley’s second championship. Following that, the men will crown their champion tonight. Number eight seed North Carolina beat two seed Duke, their arch rivals, in Saturday’s Final Four. They’ll take on one seed Kansas who beat two seed Villanova on Saturday. USA TODAY Sports’ Mackenzie Salmon and Scott Gleeson have more from New Orleans.
Scott Gleeson:
I think we saw college basketball history, right? I mean, in so many ways what Coach K was able to do with this team to get them to the Final Four and then have North Carolina play villain and spoiler, once again, I mean, this is absolutely igniting the rivalry and just, it’s one of the best games I’ve ever seen in coverage, and it’s definitely going to go down in the history books. What we saw though, I think, is North Carolina just making better plays. And North Carolina proved to be the better team because they were key down the stretch. And Duke really had grown into this absolute great team, but ultimately going against North Carolina, they just couldn’t find a way to get over the hump. And so it was, it was hard to see just with Coach K in terms of like this group, you could see the empathy he had for these players, but ultimately, he said in the press conference, North Carolina was a better team because they made the better plays down the stretch.
Mackenzie Salmon:
Looking ahead to the championship game, Kansas is obviously going to be heavily favored, but UNC just keeps defying all odds. So can you set the stage for us for Monday night?
Scott Gleeson:
yeah. So I think Kansas is going to be the favorite in this game and that’s because their offense is so dynamic. They’re really just a potent team in terms of like their weapons. And they’re also very seasoned. They’re one of the most mature teams in all college basketball and it really shows. And I think it’s definitely going to show in a national championship game because they did not look nervous at all when they’re playing in the Final Four. And so I think like that swagger’s going to carry over, but here’s the thing about North Carolina. To me play with so much emotion and that feels like the ultimate weapon and ultimate strength because coach Hubert Davis is saying he wants to see Caleb Love pointing into the stands. He wants to see him making threes and just like showing that emotion, that raw emotion. It fuels up the team, it fires up the team and it changes the momentum of the game. And definitely, I think North Carolina has a real shot to pull off the upset. Remember this team was a bubble team back at the beginning of the month, and now they have an opportunity to cut down the nets and it just really speaks volumes to what you know, Hubert Davis has done, and just this whole group. And Caleb Love is coldblooded. He’s a killer.
Taylor Wilson:
You can tune in tonight at 9:20 PM Eastern time on TBS.
And thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us seven mornings a week on whatever your favorite podcast app is. Thanks to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show, and I’m back tomorrow with more than 5 Things from USA TODAY.
www.usatoday.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism