What's up, sunshine? Rise up. I'm Coy 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.

 

lexicon [ˋlɛksɪkən] n. 词典；语汇

 

Some of the key linguistic groups for indigenous languages spoken today in the US are Navajo, Yupik, Siouan, Apache, and Iroquoian, among others.

 

Navajo [ˋnævə͵ho] n.（北美）纳瓦伙族印第安人；纳瓦伙语

Yupik [ˈjupɪk] n.尤皮克语

Siouan [ˈsuən] n. 苏语系

Apache [əˋpɑʃ] n. 阿帕契族（美国西南方，墨西哥北部的印第安部族）；阿帕契语

Iroquoian [͵ɪrəˋkwɔɪən] n.（加拿大、美国）伊洛魁族印第安人；伊洛魁语

among others「尤其」或「例如」，表示在多个事物中，还有其他类似的事物，但没有全部列出。

 

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.

 

assimilate [əˋsɪm!͵et] v. 使（民族、语音）同化[（+to/into）]

 

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.

 

none other than 不是别人而正是

 

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 two 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 Boyer. She's a member of the Anishinaabe 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's shoulder. It comes in designs that look like woodland creatures.

 

woodland [ˋwʊd͵lænd] n. 森林地带，林地

 

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.

 

corresponding [͵kɔrɪˋspɑndɪŋ] adj. 对应的

 

She provides these Scobots 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.

 

intentional [ɪnˋtɛnʃən!] adj. 有意的，故意的

 

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 Scobots 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.

 

endeavor [ɪnˋdɛvɚ] n. 努力，尽力

 

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 Kostensuchus atrox, a Cretaceous area crocodile that measured up to 12 feet long and weighed about 550 pounds.

 

Cretaceous [krɪˋteʃəs] adj.【地】白垩纪的

 

It roamed the humid floodplains 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.

 

roam [rom] v. 在……漫步；漫遊；在……流浪

floodplain [ˈflʌdˌplen] n. 洪泛区，涝原，漫滩

Patagonia [͵pætəˋgonɪə] n. 巴塔哥尼亚（南美一地区；位阿根廷及智利之南部）

almost exclusively 几乎完全

 

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 preyed on were dinosaurs.

 

canine [ˋkenaɪn] n. 犬齿; 犬科动物

 

prey on 捕食 (动物等)

 

That diet also likely doomed the prodigious predator, causing it to die out in the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

 

doom [dum] v. 使…在劫难逃; 注定

prodigious [prəˋdɪdʒəs] adj. 巨大的；庞大的

 

Researchers now hope to recover isotope information from the fossilized teeth in order to learn more about the remarkable reptile.

 

isotope [ˋaɪsə͵top]n.【物】同位素

fossilized [ˋfɑs!͵aɪzd] adj. 变成化石的

 

Pop quiz hot shot.

 

What is the maximum speed that a school bus can drive in the U.S.?

 

45 miles per hour, 65, 75, or 85 miles per hour?

 

Answer is 65 miles per hour. 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.

 

belch [bɛltʃ] v. 喷出；吐出

track [træk] v. 追踪

 

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 Narayan 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.

 

generational [͵dʒɛnəˋreʃən!] adj. 代与代之间的; relating to different generations

societal [səˋsaɪət!] adj. 社会的

 

Why is the technology not applied and how I can revolutionize this whole thing?

 

Even in the epicenter of door-to-door, on-time delivery, we didn't think in this way when it came to our kids.

 

door-to-door 挨家挨户（的），逐户（的）

 

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 Mateo! I love your shirt. I love that dragon shirt.

 

That's so cool. And for special needs families like Mateo's, knowing exactly when a safe, quiet ride will arrive at both ends is an educational game changer.

 

game changer 游戏规则改变者；游戏规则颠覆者

 

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? Have a good day. Bye Mateo.

 

So he rode a diesel bus, right? His first year? Right.

 

What was that like for him? I know he has autism.

 

autism [ˋɔtɪzəm] n. 自闭症

 

Right, so it was a little uncomfortable because 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. We also tried them on our most difficult students to see really how well the app and the technology held up. And it was great.

 

shot [ʃɑt] n. 尝试; 努力; an opportunity

try [traɪ] v. 试验，试用

 

Our parents loved it. We like to call it like Uber Lyft meets FedEx type Amazon meets Tesla. And we've merged them all together into almost the exact perfect operation.

 

Normally, school buses stop for three 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 eight 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 drivers, smarter routes make the most of everybody. And the extra juice saved gets used after school because these aren't just buses.

 

make the most of 做最有效的利用; 尽量利用

juice [dʒus] n.【俚】電，汽油

 

They are giant portable batteries, which get plugged into the grid after school and during summers.

 

74 buses in Oakland are giving 2.1 gigawatt 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.

 

Today's story getting a 10 out of 10 goesto 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.

 

ramjet [ˋræmdʒɛt] n. 喷射推进引擎

 

We are seeing a rising interest in aviation, which is good because the retirements are accelerating and we need young people to consider aviation 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, whether I want to go to the military or college and just exploring my options.

 

For these future pilots and aviation extraordinaries, 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 an awesome day, everyone. So glad to see you. I'm Coy Wire and we are CNN 10.