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Crude oil is measure in barrels.
Last summer, its global price was $100 per barrel.
Yesterday, it was trading at less than half that, at about $46.50 a barrel.
Why does that matter?
Well, the price of crude affects everything from gas prices to car prices, to stock prices.
And it determines the number of jobs in the large global oil industry.
The current glut of oil, the surplus of it, gives us a clear lesson in the economic principle of supply and demand.
When it comes to oil, it used to be all about the Middle East.
Today, the Persian Gulf still has plenty of crude, but the boom is global.
We produced a surplus of 2 million to 3 million barrels per day.
Oil buried deep beneath the earth surface in shale rock can now be accessed with new technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling.
In 2014, U.S. oil productions saw its biggest jump in more than 100 years, and it's not the only country to unleash a flood of crude.
Production in Canada and Brazil has also hit record levels.
At the same time, there are more alternatives to oil, like natural gas and renewables.
When oil supply outstrips demand, prices fall.
And cheap oil has consequences.
It's great for consumers, costing less to fuel our cars and heat homes.
But it can be tough for companies in the oil patch. It hurts profits and leads to job cuts.
And the really sharp dip can unsettle global markets.
Now announcing three of the middle high schools using our show worldwide.
First up, Sunman-Dearborn Middle School.
It's in Brookville, Indiana, the home of the Trojans.
On the West Coast, from Bel Flower,California, hello to St.John Bosco High School, with the awesome mascot of the Braves.
And from the French capital, welcome to Notre-Dame Sainte-Croix.
It's great to have you watching from Paris.
Planes, trains, cars, boats, and Hyperloop, which sounds like a fun ride at Six Flags is actually a transportation concept.
It would move people through tubes at incredibly high speeds.
Elon Musk, who founded the SpaceX Company, introduced the Hyperloop idea in 2013.
It's not a real thing yet, but a number of groups are working on it.
We dream about moving comfortably from place to place in a blink of an eye.
That's essentially the dream of the Hyperloop.
How do you envision the Hyperloop changing the way we live?
To connect to two cities that are normally six, seven, eight, nine hours apart, was in 15 to 30 minutes changes the way we live.
We're living in areas that are completely over-filled.
We're sitting in traffic every single day for hours. So…
And you think the Hyperloop could be the solution?
I think the Hyperloop is for sure one of the solutions.
A possible solution, maybe.
But it's far from the reality.
This concept of humans traveling around in tubes has been around for more than a century.
Hyperloop transportations took on the challenge, but quickly realized they didn't have the design expertise.
Enter UCLA.
The engineering aspects of this, they're actually quite simple.
It's really the design that is the most technically challenging.
It's an unconventional system.
So you sort of have to invent everything from the ground up.
The track is an entirely different element.The station is entirely different.
The process of boarding is different, so is architects.
So, what we're trying to do is stitch together the technology, the social change and the human experience.
You're traveling at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour, how could this possibly be safe?
In railroads, most accidents were all human factors.
So, we in a closed system, we're completely managed by a computer system.
There is no human factor that can actually create those issues.
How much money have you guys raised here?Zero.
How are you going to get this off the ground?
Innovation is done in teams. It's not done by a single person.
Do you feel like you're working on a project that's really going to change the future?
Oh, absolutely. If I have a date and I want to see the opera in San Francisco, I can literally do that and be back in time to go to sleep in my own house.
In terms of animals, it's hard to hate a sloth, at least, of course, when you're in a hurry.
When a woman in Surinam lost her dog back in 2005, a shelter she called told her a baby sloth had been orphaned.
So, she adopted it.
