Good morning and welcome to Kid News. I'm Tori. It's Monday, August 5th, 2019.

And we begin with going from a baseball fan to the pros in a matter of weeks.

Back on July 15th, Nathan Patterson and to the pros in a matter of weeks.

Back on July 15th, Nathan Patterson and his brother went to a Rockies game

when they decided to try the speed pitch challenge just for fun.

Suddenly, Nathan started hurling balls at 96 miles an hour, definitely in the ballpark of a

pro. A video of this feat got the attention of the Oakland Athletics, and a few days ago,

the team offered the 23 year old a minor league

contract. Patterson played ball in high school but not in college and he is

beyond thrilled. He posted on Instagram words cannot describe this feeling and I can't thank everyone

enough who has been part of this journey so far. He added, go after your dreams and make them a reality. An Irish teenager named Finn has come up with a

pretty cool way to solve a serious global pollution problem and win a really big prize at the same time.

The problem he tackled involves microplastic, which are really tiny pieces of plastic that can pass through

water filtration systems and do a lot of harm to marine life and

damage oceans. Finn found a clever solution to remove the microplastic

basically by getting it to lump together with a magnetic fluid and then using a magnet to remove

those lumps from the water. The 18-year-old's project won the grand prize of

$50,000 in educational funding at the annual Google Science Fair.

And that prize will come in handy when he starts at a university in the Netherlands this fall.

If you've ever flown Southwest, you know its flight attendance pride themselves on

take-off humor. On a trip from Nashville to Atlanta last week, one crew member took that

pre-flight fun to the next level.

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