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A Storm Resistant Town  March 24, 2025

 

What's up, sunshine? Hope you had an awesome first weekend of spring. Hope you like it a lot. Thanks to Mr. Bowler for catching my movie reference during a show last week.

 

So shout out to you and your Fisher Falcons in Aurora, Illinois, rise up. I'm Coy, this is CNN 10. It's Monday, March 24th, already the 83rd day of the year.

 

So we have 282 days left to shine in 2025. Let's make the most of this one and kick this week off with what is the best 10 minutes in news because of you.

 

We start today in London, where Heathrow Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, was brought to a complete standstill after losing power on Friday.

 

A massive electrical substation fire in a nearby London suburb plunged the airport and thousands of homes nearby into darkness while disrupting global travel for days.

 

substation [ˋsʌb͵steʃən] n. 变电所

 

The result was travel chaos over the weekend. Hundreds of planes headed for Heathrow were diverted or turned back when the substation failed.

 

divert [daɪˋvɝt] v. 转向；转移

 

The airport's backup power system was running immediately to support critical safety systems, but more than 1,300 flights were canceled and hundreds of thousands of travelers were stranded.

 

Officials are investigating what started the fire that took crews more than 24 hours to fully put out. West London residents reported explosions and a massive fireball at the substation just before midnight on Thursday.

 

Both the Metropolitan Police and the London Fire Brigade say the cause of the fire is not being treated as suspicious.

 

brigade [brɪˋged] n.（为某个目的而成立的）队，团

 

The airport was up and running again on Saturday and flights have since resumed, but it could be days before flights are operating normally again. Airlines rely on carefully coordinated networks to put planes and crews in the right place at the right time.

 

The closure forced dozens of carriers to quickly restructure their operations, moving aircraft and staff around the world. CNN's Larry Modobo is in London to show us how people there dealt with the extended delays.

 

Heathrow is finally fully open again, but that does not mean your flight will take off and land on time or at all.

 

Why? For instance, British Airways expects only 85% capacity today. That's because planes, pilots, cabin crew are not where they should be. They were diverted to airports all across Europe.

 

Some did not take off at all trying to get to Heathrow. It will take a few days until schedules are back on track again.

 

The airport was closed for almost 18 hours and when an airport this big, Europe's busiest, is closed for almost a whole day, that affects a lot of people, almost 200,000 people from around the world who are trying to get here or to leave.

 

Heathrow says it is supporting passengers who are stranded to leave. That's the priority right now and it's working to try and clear that as possible. The advice, check with your airline.

 

If you have a flight leaving Heathrow or coming into Heathrow, check to make sure that it's still on schedule. The British utility company National Grid has said it's deeply sorry for the disruption caused by that fire at a substation supplying the airport.

 

Authorities are investigating what happened. They're not treating it as suspicious, but the police say they're keeping an open mind.

 

10 second trivia. Which hurricane name has been used the most during hurricane seasons in the Atlantic? Arlene, Brett, Emily, or Gordon?

 

Your answer is Arlene.

 

Used 10 times since 1959, lists of names are reused every six years and names of very destructive hurricanes are retired.

 

As hurricanes in the Atlantic grow more powerful year after year,one town in Florida is proving that engineering communities to withstand storms is possible. Developer Sid Kitson broke ground on one such sustainable town in 2016.

 

Built and engineered to withstand flooding and high winds, the community is surrounded by nature preserves. It has its own solar electricity generation.

 

And in 2018, it opened as Florida's first so-called storm-proof town. Our Bill Weir shows us how Babcock Ranch held up when it came time for the ultimate test.

 

These are hurricane-resistant windows up to 150 miles an hour. These things are bowing in like this.

 

bow [bo] v. 形成弓形，弯曲

 

Former NFL lineman-turned-developer Sid Kitson bought 91,000 acres of Florida wetlands and then sold most of it back to the state so his dream town would be surrounded by protected nature, which in a storm is the best water storage system ever invented.

 

lineman [ˋlaɪnmən] n.【橄】（锋，卫等）前锋

 

He also buried Babcock's power lines, landscaped with only native plants, and engineered the whole town for high winds.

 

Then came the test, Category 4 Ian, which stalled over the 5,000 new residents for eight hours with Sid in the middle worried sick all the while.

 

worried sick 担心得要命; worried to death; extremely anxious

 

Next morning, I got up, I jumped in my truck, and I started driving around. I spent four or five hours. I hit every single neighborhood here, talked to the people, but people were wandering around like, what just happened?

 

wander [ˋwɑndɚ] v. 闲逛

 

Because on TV, all you saw was destruction, unfortunately, loss of life, and just all around us, massive flooding.

 

And they're walking around going, wow, we're looking pretty good.

 

While neighboring towns were devastated, Babcock Ranchnever flooded, never lost power, and has since survived Hurricane Milton in similar fashion.

 

We've talked to a number of the insurance companies and they're open to rewarding good behavior.

 

rewarding [rɪˋwɔrdɪŋ] adj. 值得做的; 有意义的; 有益的；有报酬的; 有利的

 

Rewarding building the homes the right way, building a community the right way, because it's just not the home construction, but the community itself also needs to be storm resistant.

 

Today's story, getting a 10 out of 10, a robot dog that is almost like the real thing. Check out Luna, a robot pup created by a Swedish AI startup company that says this four-legged friend can learn and adapt just like a real fur baby.

 

Our Anna Stewart shows us how the company is using a specific type of artificial intelligence that allows Luna to interact with the physical world.

 

You may have seen robots that walk like dogs, but how about robots that think like dogs?

 

The Swedish startup Intuicell aims to make artificial intelligence more animal-like. Their robot dog Luna is one of the first to use physical agentic AI.

 

agentic AI 代理式人工智慧

 

Unlike generative AI, which essentially does pattern matching to generate content or make predictions, the physical agentic AI used to create Luna can make decisions and take action towards specific goals, just like humans and many animals.

 

generative AI 生成式人工智能

pattern matching 模式匹配

 

The company says this means Luna can learn like a real dog. Rather than using a generative AI model and datasets to teach Luna how to walk, Intuicell will hire a dog trainer.

 

dataset [ˋdetəsɛt] n. 资料组; 数据集

 

The way Luna learns is based on how neurons interact and process information.

 

In a sense, we're not talking about today's AI versus tomorrow's AI. I see this as the difference between machine learning and biological intelligence.

 

in a sense 就某种意义来说

 

What we want to show is that machines can have genuine digital intelligence to learn new things and to solve problems that they've never seen before, just like humans and animals can.

 

Luthman says their breakthrough is based on more than 30 years of research into how the brain works that the company translated into their software.

 

He hopes that next, human-like robots can venture into unpredictable environments such as space, deep sea exploration, or disaster response.

 

One possibility is sending intelligent robots like Luna to Mars.

 

If you want to send a robot to Mars to build habitats for future generations, you can't do it with pre-trained models. It's impossible to train them on everything that might happen while they're there.

 

They need to be able to figure things out and to experiment in that environment. So this is the technology that will allow any agent to do such exploration.

 

Luna has now learned to stand on its feet.

 

Intuosell says the robot dog is able to perceive, process, and improve by interacting with the world.

 

AI dog trainer could be a pretty cool job. And as a pet, no cleanup, no expensive dog food.

 

What say you, would you ever get a robotic dog or would you rather stick with the real thing?

 

All right, we are almost out of time for the day, but before we go, we want to give a special shout out to the Raiders of Black Mountain Middle School in San Diego, California, rise up.

 

Thank you for making us part of your day. And thanks to all of you who've been subscribing and commenting on our CNN 10 YouTube channel and for your shout out requests, we're almost at 1 million subscribers.

 

Let's go. I'm Coy Wire and we are CNN 10.