Name: Training Self-Driving Cars | March 26, 2025
Uploaded: 2025-03-27T02:40:31.000Z
Duration: 10 min
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Time to shine bright and get our minds right.

I'm Coy, this is CNN 10, and it is your CNN 10, especially on a Your Word Wednesday, because one of you helped us write today's show with one of your unique vocabulary word submissions.

Let's start today with the latest hurdle of driverless car companies looking to become mainstream.

Driverless cars, also known as self-driving or autonomous vehicles, navigate without human input.

Instead, they use sensors, cameras, radar, and LIDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging, to detect road signals, other vehicles, and the terrain around them.

The car's software, powered by artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms, uses the data collected to send almost instantaneous instructions to the car's controls.

Testing and launching autonomous cars has been an infractious journey.

There have been crashes from systems malfunctions.

There have been pedestrian accidents when systems didn't respond to people.

In one case, earlier this year, a Los Angeles tech entrepreneur found himself trapped in a self-driving taxi on his way to the airport with the car repeatedly circling around a parking lot.

After years of research and testing, though, autonomous cars are already on the streets of cities from San Francisco to Wuhan.

And now, high-speed, unmarked roads in rural areas, which sometimes have very few signs, have become the next challenge in testing driverless cars.

Check out how car manufacturer Nissan set out to navigate this hurdle in the UK to develop an autonomous car that can handle every type of road it might encounter.

You can already find them on the streets of San Francisco and Wuhan.

But there's one place they have yet to conquer.

The winding, high-speed country roads of the UK.

We think this is one of the most ambitious autonomous driving programs that's ongoing today in the world.

We feel if we hadn't have done the research in the UK, we would not have had something which would be so comprehensive to cover all of the roads the future customer needs.

The difficult thing about autonomous driving, or AD, is there are lots of things that can go wrong.

In cities, there are lots of aids to help AD cars.

Road markings, slow speeds, signs, traffic lights.

But those aids are less common on the roads outside cities.

And that's where the Nissan-led Evolve AD program comes in.

What we have here is our next generation autonomous vehicles.

These vehicles have the capability of driving down rural roads, following the highway code, but doing speeds of 55 to 60 miles an hour.

Yep, and the vehicle's now in autonomous mode.

It's quite ghostly, isn't it, when it kind of does the whole thing by itself?

Because we do this all day, every day, we forget what it must feel like for new people to jump in and experience it for the first time.

Evolve AD is the last step in the research phase of Nissan's autonomous driving journey, having successfully proven the technology on highways and in cities.

There's likely one question, though, on many people's minds.

It acts better than an advanced driver because an advanced driver looks to the left and to the right.

The AD vehicle looks all around it all the time.

It feels really different being out front like this.

The car is covered with sensors, including laser technology and cameras.

And Nissan has also introduced a chassis control system that enhances braking and steering.

There are other sources of information the car can use as well.

We can take signals from outside of the vehicle, such as CCTV cameras, this kind of thing, which basically gives us an added capability, which means that we can see effectively around the corner.

After 16,000 miles on the UK's public roads and no accidents, Nissan's plan is to take the learnings from the Evolve AD program and use them in the development of their first autonomous vehicle mobility service, due to hit the roads of Japan in 2027.

This is great technology, and it's something you're going to see a lot more of in the future.

What is a collective noun for a group of gorillas?

They stay in family groups that can have up to 30 members, including a dominant male, several females, and their youngins.

Mountain gorillas have been classified as endangered, meaning they face a very high risk of extinction in the wild because of factors like poaching, habitat loss, and disease.

Well, Uganda's first wildlife vet and conservation NGO founder has started a project empowering locals to grow cash crops like coffee or tea to support safe and healthy gorilla populations.

Our Bill Weir shows us how the Ready to Grow program is helping people, gorillas, and other wildlife coexist.

In the highlands of southwestern Uganda, Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zukusoka is working to break the chain of disease transmission between humans and mountain gorillas.

But sickness is just one of the many challenges facing these great apes.

With such close proximity to the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, much of the local community has relied on the forest for food and firewood for generations.

And though the intention is rarely to hurt the gorillas, they are vulnerable to accidental injury.

In most cases, these people are just looking to put food on the table.

So they don't actually attack the gorillas to eat them.

If they're busy poaching other animals like daikaro bush pig and they come across gorillas, that happens from time to time.

They set out snares and they spear the gorillas because they're trying to go for other food.

The mission to reduce poaching in the forest is twofold.

First, help the local community see the benefits that gorilla tourism can bring to the area in the form of new jobs and infrastructure and schools.

And secondly, in helping former poachers find alternative income.

During the pandemic, we started the Ready to Grow program, where we give them fast-growing seedlings.

So far now we've distributed to 3,000 households.

And then we also try and encourage them to have a cash crop, like coffee or tea, because the more that they have food security, the less likely they're going to enter the forest to poach.

So in 2016, Gladys and her husband Lawrence launched a new coffee brand that would provide a stable income for Buwindi's farmers while also protecting the gorillas.

We started off with 75 farmers, of which only five were women.

We now have 630 farmers, of which 230 are women.

It's set up to only sell coffee from where gorillas are found.

And this equates to premium or specialty coffee.

And a donation from every bag sold goes to support community health, gorilla health and conservation education in the same communities around the national park.

So in that way, we're providing sustainable financing for conservation.

Today's story is getting a 10 out of 10, so 20 out of 20.

Man versus nature and nature versus nature, a lightning strike from above, wreaking havoc on a poor old tree you just have to see, all caught on a home security camera in Tennessee and in Utah.

We get to see what happened when engineers tested out avalanche prevention by setting off another avalanche.

This one in Utah, where the official response to a natural avalanche was to set off another unnatural one.

Engineers did just that, triggering an intense snowy slide that kicked up a powdery plume in the Cottonwoods Canyon area, all to try and prevent damage should just such a thing happen again.

Finally, nobody planned for it, nobody could control it, but it appears no one was injured when a lightning bolt suddenly blasted a Nashville homes front yard tree.

The sudden strike sent splinters and shards flying in the surveillance video, which is impressive but unfortunately has no sound.

Huge thanks to everyone who submitted an array of considerable commanding and demanding words for your word Wednesday.

Today's winner is Sharon High School in Sharon, Massachusetts for infractious, an adjective meaning full of twists and turns.

And we've got a special shout out today going to LaPlaza High School in LaPlaza, Maryland.

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Training Self-Driving Cars | March 26, 2025

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