Kickstart: Swimming at a football stadium

When 1,000 of the best swimmers in the U.S. gather for the Olympic Trials competition in a couple of weeks, they'll be diving into a specially built steel and PVC temporary pool built on a field that normally hosts the NFL's Indianapolis Colts.

Italy-based Myrtha Pools has a lot of experience building pools for high-level competition, including pools housing world championships and past U.S. Olympic Trials. Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis will house two competition pools while the stands will be filled with what's expected to be a record crowd.

"We're doing it for the first time ever, building pools in a football stadium," Shana Ferguson of USA Swimming told Indianapolis TV station WRTV. "There will be global attention on this meet, not just because American swimmers are so fast … but because we are creating such a spectacle in a football stadium."

In addition to the PVC interior on the steel structure, the pool uses miles of plastic pipe to circulate and filter the water.

Members of the U.S. Olympic squad competing in Paris this summer will be selected in the trials set for June 15-23.

It's clear that the transition to electric and fuel cell vehicles will be complicated and expensive.

But who should shoulder the bulk of the costs associated with those changes? A lot of automakers favor plans that would force suppliers to pick up some of those fees or potentially see them lose businesses to competition in lower-cost countries.

"You are going to see a huge shift of the supplier base. The sourcing will move from the Western world to the best-cost countries," said Carlos Taveres, CEO of Stellantis, according to a Reuters report from an investing conference.

But is that the only road available for a struggling auto industry? According to a German industry trade group, it's not.

Just a few days before Taveres' presentation, the leader of the German Rubber Industry Association (WDK) released a statement pointing to a move made by Toyota in 2022 for "fair cooperation" that has made it possible to pass on higher material and production costs.

"As a supplier, we hardly experience any accommodation in our delivery obligations to the automotive industry," Michael Klein said in a May 24 statement.

Toyota's ability to accept "justified price increases" from suppliers has supported its suppliers with billions of dollars worth of payments making it possible to maintain staff and as a result "develop and protect its own supply chain."

Plastic utensils and foodservice products are often blamed for contributing to pollution. Police in New York City, though, are crediting a plastic fork for possibly contributing to solving a murder.

NBC News reports that Anthony Scalici was indicted for the 2009 stabbing death of his uncle, Rosario Prestigiacomo, after police compared DNA found at the crime scene in Queens to a sample collected from a plastic fork Scalici had discarded.

A DNA search at the time of the murder did not identify a suspect, but a growing public database of DNA tests via consumer genetic testing helped narrow the search in 2023. Police in Florida were asked to collect evidence that would include Scalici's DNA, and they nabbed the fork.