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What's up, sunshine? Rise up. I'm Ky
Wire. Welcome to another edition of CNN
10, where I simply tell you the what,
letting you decide what to think. I'm
ready. You ready? Let's go. We begin
with a creative new approach to
preserving indigenous languages. While
the two primary languages spoken in the
US are English and Spanish, there are
still several native communities that
use the original lexicon spoken by the
first people who inhabited their land.
Some of the key linguistic groups for
indigenous languages spoken today in the
US are Navajo, Yupic, Suen, Apache, and
Irakcoyan among others. But as these
native populations continue to decrease
and assimilate into modern cultures,
many not by choice, some cultural
institutions have been doing important
work to try to preserve the languages
that remain. And one young woman who
belongs to an indigenous community in
Michigan is taking matters into her own
hands, inventing a language robot
inspired by none other than an Elmo toy.
Meet the Scobot, an interactive robot
that helps children learn indigenous
languages using live translation. Here's
our Claire Duffy with the story.
The United Nations estimates that one
indigenous language will die every 2
weeks and that half of the world's
languages will disappear by 2100. So now
there's this growing group of
researchers and technologists who are
looking to reverse that trend with the
help of AI and robotics. Many of them
are young members of indigenous
communities who want to help others like
themselves connect to their language and
culture. I spoke with 24-year-old
Danielle Boyet. She's a member of the
Inishab community in Northern Michigan.
And she said she grew up speaking only a
little bit of her community's native
language because of generational
language loss. So she created the
Scobot. This is a small robot that sits
on the wearer shoulder. It comes in
designs that look like woodland
creatures. And when a user says a word
to it in English, it uses AI speech
recognition technology to respond with a
corresponding pre-recorded audio file,
saying that word back to the user in the
native language. She provides these
schoolots to students in classrooms who
get to build them and then interact with
them to learn the language. And I asked
Danielle why it was so important to her
to preserve and document this language.
Here's what she told me. When you lose
your language, you lose such a key
component of your culture and of your
ways. It's the way that we communicate
about the world around us. It's the way
that we tell stories. Now, young
technologists who are working in this
space say they're being very intentional
about how to apply artificial
intelligence to the problem of
preserving endangered languages because
of a history where resources from
indigenous communities have been taken
without their consent, without
compensation. So, for example, Danielle
says that it was a very intentional
choice for her to use pre-recorded audio
files of kids from the community in her
school rather than an AI generated
synthetic voice because, in her words,
language learning should be a community
endeavor, not just something that you do
between you and a robot. Now to a
groundbreaking discovery in Argentina,
where scientists have unearthed the most
complete skeleton to date of an extinct
apex predator with a taste for
dinosaurs. They've dubbed it Costan
Sucus Atrox, a Cretaceous area crocodile
that measured up to 12 feet long and
weighed about 550 lbs. It roamed the
humid flood plains of what is now
Patagonia nearly 70 million years ago,
much farther south than previously
thought. It was a hyper carnivore,
meaning its diet was almost exclusively
meat, including other dinosaurs.
It was a predator that had enormous
teeth, very high, very pointed canines.
Surely with that, it could give a strong
bite, retain prey. We assume that the
animals these enormous crocodiles prayed
on were dinosaurs.
That diet also likely doomed the
predigious predator, causing it to die
out in the mass extinction event at the
end of the Cretaceous period.
Researchers now hope to recover isotope
information from the fossilized teeth in
order to learn more about the remarkable
reptile.
Pop quiz hot shot. What is the maximum
speed that a school bus can drive in the
US? 45 mph, 65, 75, or 85 mph?
Answer is 65 mph. An estimated 25
million children ride school buses each
and every day in America.
Quick question. What's the largest mass
transit system in the country? Give you
a hint. It's yellow. That's right.
School buses. Millions of students rely
on them to get to and from school. But
what if your school commute could be
cleaner, quieter, and smarter? One
company is aiming to do just that by
revolutionizing the way we use the big
yellow buses. Our Bill Weir has a look.
For 100 years, the wheels on the bus
have gone round and round, round and
round, with very little improvement.
Yellow diesel dinosaurs belching fumes
all through the town and with no way to
track America's most precious cargo.
Like, you can track your pizza, you can
track your packages, but you have no
idea where your children are. My
champion for change is a mom/engineer
who set out to reinvent the school bus.
It's a company called Zoom.
When Ritu Nion moved to Silicon Valley
and started a family, she found the same
child transport challenges her mother
faced back in India.
Nothing had changed. This problem is
generational. It is very much societal.
Why is the technology not applied and
how I can revolutionize this whole
thing? Even in the epicenter of
door-to-door ontime delivery,
we didn't think in this way when it came
to our kids.
Yeah, it is a problem hidden in plain
sight. Like nobody realizes it's the
largest mass transit system in the
country. 27 million kids commute twice
daily on this infrastructure.
Hi Matteo, I love your shirt. I love
that dragon shirt. That's so cool. And
for special needs families like
Matteo's, knowing exactly when a safe,
quiet ride will arrive at both ends is
an educational game changer.
Sometimes they'll tell you like it's
coming a little early or it's running
late, but right now it's still on
schedule.
That's so great. And our driver is
Diana.
Yes. So it gives you the driver's
information. Ready? All right. Have a
good day. Nice. Nice.
Bye, Mattel.
So he rode a diesel bus, right, his
first year, right?
What was that like for him? I he has
autism,
right? So it was uh a little
uncomfortable cuz he the noise. So he
was just sometimes like cover his ears,
you know, it bothered him. Now with
these buses, like you can barely hear
him, so that's not an issue anymore.
Oakland became Zoom's first big customer
thanks to Kimberly Rainey, who came from
package delivery at FedEx. We gave them
a little bit of a shot. Uh we also tried
them on our most difficult students to
see really how well that the app and the
technology held up. Um and it was great.
Our parents loved it. We like to call it
like Uber Lift meets FedEx type Amazon
meets Tesla. And we've merged them all
together into almost the exact perfect
operation.
Normally school buses stop for 3 minutes
every stop. And the reason for that is
they want to make sure the kid is there
and nobody has missed each other. In our
case, we are able to reduce that
boarding time to 8 seconds per stop.
By trying to solve one problem, she
ended up solving all kinds of other
problems. Since there is a national
shortage of bus drivers, smarter routes
make the most of everybody. And the
extra juice saved gets used after
school. Because these aren't just buses,
they are giant portable batteries which
get plugged into the grid after school
and during summers.
74 buses in Oakland are giving 2.1
gawatt hours of energy which is
equivalent to powering 400 homes
annually. Zoom is in 14 states, 4,000
schools across the country and we are
rapidly growing. So our mission is to
enable 10,000 buses in the next few
years.
School bus by day, power plant by night.
That's right. That's right.
[Applause]
Today's story getting a 10 out of 10
goes to a nonprofit in Nebraska
dedicated to helping a new generation
take flight in careers of aviation.
Young adults are invited to aviation
STEM day at the Millard airport for
hands-on aviation experiences. From
flying a Cessna 172 simulator to hearing
the roar of a live ramjet engine. We are
seeing a rising interest in aviation
which is good because uh the retirements
are um accelerating and we need young
people to consider aviation as a as a
career.
I became interested in aviation a couple
years ago. So I'm just doing all the
exploring I can to just figure out what
I want to do, where I want to go to
school or if I want to go to school. um
whether I want to go to the military or
college and just exploring my options.
For these future pilots and aviation
extraordinaires, the sky is not the
limit. It's just the beginning. All
right, superstars. Time for a shout out.
This one's going to St. Joseph's Indian
School in Chamberlain, South Dakota.
Going out and making it an awesome day,
everyone. So glad to see you. I'm Koi
Wire and we are CNN 10.
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