After 100 years, the school bus gets a 21st century makeover

What's up, sunshine? Rise up. I'm Koi 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 U.S. are Navajo, Yupik, Siouxan, Apache, and Iroquoian, 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 Skobot. 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 Boye. 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. 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. saying that word back to the user in the native language. 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. 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 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 Costansuchus atrox. Cretaceous area crocodile that measured up to 12 feet long and weighed about 550 pounds. It roamed the humid floodplains of what is now Patagonia nearly 70 million years ago, much farther south than previously thought.

It was a hypercarnivore, 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 preyed on were dinosaurs.

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. Researchers now hope to recover isotope information from the fossilized teeth in order to learn. more about the remarkable reptile. Pop quiz hotshot, what is the maximum speed that a school bus can drive in the US? 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. 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 slash 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. 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. 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? Have a good day. Bye, Mateo. So he rode... a diesel bus right his first year right what was that like for him he has autism right so it was a little uncomfortable because 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 them 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. 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 first 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 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, 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 the retirements are accelerating, and we need young people to consider aviation as a... 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 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 an awesome day, everyone. So glad to see you. I'm Koi Wire and we are CNN 10.