📌 Thumbs Up For Trump, Panama Canal, More

A large majority of speech watchers approved of what they heard from President Trump's joint address to Congress Tuesday night.

The viewership was mostly Republican — typically, a president's party draws more of their partisans. A CBS News/YouGov survey interviewed a nationally representative sample of speech watchers immediately following the president's address to Congress.

Big majorities of viewers liked the plans they heard on immigration, wasteful government spending, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. A relatively smaller majority liked what they heard on tariffs.

Most speech viewers described the president as "presidential, "inspiring," and more "unifying" than "divisive." A big majority also called it “entertaining."

Most said Mr. Trump talked a lot about issues they care about. Most viewers who tuned in say the speech made them feel "hopeful" and “proud."

Viewers said they wanted to hear about plans for lowering prices, and about two-thirds of those who watched think the president has a clear plan for dealing with that.

The Democrats who did watch mostly described Trump’s address as making them feel "worried" and for 4 in 10, “angry."

US asset management giant BlackRock has agreed to buy two ports at both ends of the Panama Canal.

The deal involves BlackRock and a consortium to spend $22.8 billion to buy the ports of Balboa and Cristobal from CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong company, whose ownership had angered President Donald Trump.

The deal is an agreement in principle. BlackRock’s consortium is also buying CK Hutchison’s controlling interest in 43 other ports comprising 199 berths in 23 countries, but none of the ports it operates in China or Hong Kong.

BlackRock is one of the world’s largest asset managers, with an enormous pool of $11.6 trillion in assets. For context, that sum equal is to about 40% of the United States’ gross domestic product, the broadest measure of a nation’s economic activity.

The 51-mile canal is a key to both the movement of international trade and US military vessels. About 4% of the world’s maritime trade and more than 40% of US container traffic traverses the canal.

A study released in December by IDB Invest reported that 23.6% of Panama’s annual income is generated from the canal and companies that provide services related to the canal’s operations.

The oldest and largest iceberg on Earth landed on a sub-Antarctic island belonging to Britain Tuesday.

The British Antarctic Survey research organization said the mass known as A23a stopped drifting and ran aground on South Georgia, an unpopulated island that is part of the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and is approximately 932 miles from the Falkland Islands.

Oceanographer Dr. Andrew Meijers said now that A23a is grounded, "it is even more likely to break up due to the increased stresses," but that its fate is "practically impossible to predict.”

He also explained that while icebergs are part of the normal lifecycle of the Antarctic ice sheet, about 6,000 billion tons of its mass has been lost since 2000, and that has been matched by increasing melting of ice shelves and a measured loss of grounded Antarctic ice.”

Meijers said that as A23 continues to break up, it could create smaller icebergs that might make some regions dangerous for fishing operations.

NASA’s two stuck astronauts are just a few weeks away from returning to Earth after nine months in space.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have to wait until their replacements arrive at the International Space Station next week before they can check out later this month.

Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched last June aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule, making its crew debut after years of delay. The Starliner had so many problems getting to the space station that NASA ruled it too dangerous to carry anyone, and it flew back empty.

Williams said she can’t wait to be reunited with her Labrador retrievers. The hardest part about the unexpected extended stay, she added, was the wait by their families back home. “It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us.”

Around 38% of Americans say they’ve experienced some type of “sports-related mistreatment” in their lives, a study finds.

Mistreatment ranged from psychological and emotional to physical and sexual. But most people who reported it experienced more than one kind, the research found. And one-third of those who never even played organized sports reported sports-related mistreatment.

As many who reported mistreatment said they had not played organized sports, suggesting it could have occurred during school recess, physical education classes, informal play with peers, or while watching sports, said Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and sociology professor at Ohio State University.

The study used survey data of 3,849 adults from all 50 states who answered the survey online in 2018–2019. The researchers found that psychological or emotional mistreatment was most common, cited by 64% of those mistreated. About 25% of those reporting mistreatment said it was physical, while 10% said it was sexual.

The most common reason people reported for abuse was their weight, cited by 52% of mistreated respondents. Next were gender (34%), sexual identity (20%), race or ethnicity (19%), disability status (12%) and religion (11%). White males were most likely to be mistreated.

As for the studious, those who were successful students and less athletic reported more mistreatment. “It is important to better understand how frequently negative interactions occur and what we can do as a society to improve the culture of sport,” Knoester said.

Men with higher-quality semen live longer, report Danish scientists who analyzed samples from nearly 80,000 men.

They found that those who produced more than 120 million swimming sperm per ejaculate lived two to three years longer than those who produced fewer than 5 million.

The men with the highest-quality sperm lived to 80.3 years old on average, compared with 77.6 for those with the poorest-quality sperm, the researchers report.

The finding implies that semen quality reflects a man’s broader health and how likely he is to succumb to medical conditions later in life. On every measure of sperm quality the researchers checked, poorer quality was linked to earlier death.

The men in the study had their semen analyzed between 1965 and 2015 after they reported problems starting a family with their partner. The samples were assessed for semen volume, sperm concentration, sperm shape, and the proportion of swimming sperm.

Using national registers, the researchers tracked the men’s health for up to 50 years. They now want to find out which diseases are more common in men with poor semen quality. If particular conditions are identified, doctors could ultimately advise men on preventive action should sperm analysis show they are at risk.

Looking up at the spreading branches of Thimmamma Marrimanu, or “Thimmamma’s Banyan Tree,” isn’t possible.

Why? Because they spread farther than the eye can see at any single point. Thimmamma Marrimanu, in the Andhra Pradesh state in India’s southeast, is 2.5 times the size of the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. and 4 times the size of a football field. It has set the record as the world’s largest tree canopy.

Looking at the 550-year-old member of the Ficus genus from a distance, one is likely to believe they’re looking at a grove of trees. Walking between the trunks that twist and grab like tentacles, one may believe they’re in a grove.

But they’d be wrong. With 4.7 acres of canopy coverage supported by 1,000 individual trunks, Thimmamma Marrimanu is one of the living wonders of the world.

Banyans are a strangler fig trees, which grow parasitically by sprouting from cracks and crevices in other trees. Eventually, banyans consume them, leaving a hollowed interior. Banyans have the distinction of being Earth’s largest parasitical organism.