Welcome to another edition of Cool Stuff Ride Home.

My name's Marcus Paff and coming up on this episode, Recycled Glass.

Can it be used to assist in tempering hurricane destruction?

We'll give you the how and why coming up.

Plus a cold to potentially combat COVID.

And finally, one freaky looking wasp that

thankfully does not reside on this earth anymore and hasn't done so for a long, long time.

That plus a look at this day in history. Coming up, it's cool stuff.

Turning to a story from Science News and author Jude Coleman. In the 1960s, saltwater intrusion in a southeast Louisiana swamp

killed the trees and plants that lived there. Now restored with freshwater, the swamp has become

the perfect place for re-vegetation projects, particularly because healthy swamps can serve as a speed

bump to slow hurricanes.

That's one reason why the open water of Bayou Bienvenu, once home to Cyprus and Tupelo trees,

now hosts an island of native trees, grasses, and recycled glass.

The artificial island is helping researchers understand a new approach to coastal restoration.

Created by a team of scientists and a glass recycling company, the roughly 10-meter diameter island

is made from a mix of glass ground into sand and Mississippi River sediment. A second island,

next to it, also dotted with plants, is made fully from sediment.

The team wants to know if there are any differences in how the plants grow to figure out if the

glass sand mixture could be a viable material for restoring coastal ecosystems.

As sea levels rise and coast erode, quote, all coastal areas are going to deal with issues, end quote.

That per Sunshine Van Baal, a community ecologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, who is

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