The rich history behind Asia's largest water fight | April 15, 2026

[0:11]Hello and rise up. I'm Coy Wire here with your 10 minutes of news on this your word Wednesday. One of you helped us write today's show with a vocab word you submitted on the socials. We had so many compelling words, tough to choose just one. I'd like to defenestrate myself from the position of picker. Shout out to Mr. Westbrook's class, Lakeridge Junior High in Orem, Utah, a little bonus word to start our day. Go leopards. We begin with an update on some wicked weather that is battering much of the Central US. The week of severe storms started on Monday with multiple tornadoes demolishing buildings in Kansas, heavy rain, stranding vehicles on flooded streets in Wisconsin, and baseball-sized hail slamming parts of three states. In total, at least a dozen tornadoes were reported across the central region of the country, three of them touching down in Minnesota, including this one that was caught on video. Parts of the Midwest are dealing with severe flooding spurred by heavy rainfall. Our water treatment guy told us we had four and a half inches in roughly three hours or something like that. Have you ever seen the water this high like this before? No, I've talked to people that have lived here their whole lives and we've never seen the water this high. Forecasters fear the worst could still be on the way with heavy rains, strong winds, hail, and flooding that could last through Friday. The storms could impact a huge area stretching from the Texas Mexico border to the Great Lakes region, so make sure to listen to your local weather officials for the latest updates. Next up, the WNBA draft earlier this week was historic. Thanks to the new collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players. This draft class is cashing in, the top pick pulling in half a million dollars in year one alone. That's seven times what last year's number one pick Paige Becker's earned. Same dream, same spotlight, very different paycheck, a sign of progress. Azi Fud, Yukon's sharpshooter, taking number one overall by the Dallas Wings. Fudd reunited with her former Yukon teammate, last year's top pick, Paige Becker in Dallas. Our time at Yukon felt like I mean it was just full of injury, full of like, either I was playing, she wasn't, she was playing, I wasn't. It wasn't until last year, um, that we really got a chance to actually play together. And just so much potential, um, with not just her but the entire Dallas Wings roster, so I, I can't wait obviously to play with her again but to, to play with every single one of them. Now, record books, a $2.2 million deal, richest rookie contract in WNBA history. An update now for one of the most popular gaming platforms for youngsters, Roblox, after months of discussions and research, the app is changing how players access it. Starting in June, accounts will be divided by age using age check technology. To complete the process, users have to follow a series of on-screen instructions for facial verification. Kids ages five to eight will have chat turned off and access to games will be strictly limited by the contents rating. The company says older kids will have a bit more access, but they say safety controls will still be in place, allowing them only to chat with age checked users in similar age groups. Why? Roblox has faced pressure to better protect children from inappropriate content and prevent interactions with others that are not age appropriate. Now to a moment caught on camera that has conservationist saying, was it a cat I saw? That phrase, by the way, is a palindrome. Camera traps photographed a rare Cloud Jaguar high up in the Merondon mountain range of Honduras. First time it's been detected there in a decade, a positive sign for the Central American nation attempting an environmental turnaround. The elusive feline is struggling to thrive due to poaching and habitat loss from deforestation and human development. Pop quiz out shot, which U.S. state has the highest number of recorded fossil finds? Texas, California, Colorado, or Montana. If you said California, put your hands up and show those pits. Home to the Labrea Tar pits, California clocked the most fossils. Montana, though, shows the highest diversity of discoveries, including T-Rex bones than any other state. A pair of snorkeling scientists found an underground fossil-filled cave leading to unprecedented paleontological discoveries in Central Texas. According to the University of Texas at Austin, the scientists gained access to a previously unmapped cave on private property and snorkeled through underwater streams, leading to an area brimming with undisturbed fossils. It was there, according to a study published in the journal Quaternary Research, that co-authors John Moretti and John Young discovered among dozens of fossils, the remains of a giant tortoise and a relative of the Armadillo the size of a lion. The study says the remains of those ice age animals dating back some 100,000 years had never previously been found in Central Texas before and have raised new questions about what is known about the region's geological and climatic past. Ever wish you could dinosaur back into time? Well, now we can. No time machine required. Actually, you do use a virtual time machine of sorts. A new VR experience called Age of Dinosaurs just launched, taking players 150 million years into the past. Created in partnership with the Natural History Museum London, dinosaur experts and California-based Sandbox VR. It's not your average Jurassic joy ride. It's science meets cinema. It's wonderful, very educational, very cinematic. Um, I learned a lot and I've really enjoyed it. Um, dinosaurs right in your face, they're all around you. It's not like you're just walking through some kind of static thing, it's uh, yeah, very immersive, very educational, loved it. We're talking razor sharp teeth, ultra detailed scales, even muscle movement under the skin, all vetted by real life Dino experts. I get to work with the team at Sandbox and tell them, um, what I know about, you know, what we should make the animals look like, how they should behave. What kind of interesting ideas we can put into the animation? Are there are there particularly interesting pieces of behavior that could involve interaction with people that we might build in. And not just the animals themselves, but we had to build the environment. We went to an awful lot of trouble to, um, reconstruct the plants and the environments quite accurately to build this completely immersive prehistoric world. With full body tracking and haptic vest, you won't just see a T-Rex, you might feel its footsteps. Those of us who have a bank account might know that sometimes it can be a pain in the keister to make time to go into the bank, wait in line. Well, what if you had a bank right there in your school, for the students, run by the students. All while teaching them about managing finances. That's exactly what's happening at Blackman High School in Murphysboro, Tennessee. Check it out. In Blackman High School in Murphysboro, you will find a Redstone Federal Credit Union branch. It's a real bank in a real school, run entirely by students. Like I'm actually handling people's money. During lunch period, we have members here within this school, teachers and students, they can make deposits, uh, withdrawals, get change. Uh, pay certain loans if they have one through Redstone. This is the first branch inside a Tennessee high school. Since the partnership between the school and the bank launched around five years ago, more than a hundred students have taken the capstone course. A really good quality job as a teenager, and we're getting class credit for it. So it's like a golden opportunity for us almost. Supervised by teachers, students also train and work with real bank employees. The basic finances are really important, like when you swipe your debit card, they come out of your checking account. And this is something they're learning and then they get to help their peers. Building their resumes while learning personal finance at the same time. What does it look like for my own personal finance? What does it look like for my own banking decisions? Um, how does it look for me to interact with a business and a company? Um, and I just think those are the real world kind of experiences that we're wanting to make sure that our students have. Today's story getting a 10 out of 10. Waterfight. Asia's largest water fight as crowds across Thailand celebrate Songkran, the Thai New Year festival on Sunday. Also known as the Water Festival, Songkran takes place every April with locals, tourists, young and old, flooding the neighborhood squares to splash each other with buckets, hoses, water balloons and more. Why, you ask? To symbolize the washing away of bad luck and a fresh start for the year ahead. The word Songkran comes from a Sanskrit term that roughly translates to astrological passage or movement, symbolizing the sun moving into a new position in the zodiac, but for most folks, clearly, it also symbolizes fun. Big congrats to our Your Word Wednesday winners, Mr. Haffen friends at Dixon Public School in Dixon, Montana, who submitted Palindrome, a noun meaning a word or phrase or sequence that reads the same backward as forward. Like none, race car, uh, rise to vote, sir. Thanks for putting that on our radar. Also a palindrome. And shout out to Mr. Watts mathematicians at Lime-Old Lime High School in Old Lime, Connecticut. This gift is for the birds, and I mean that in the best possible way. I love birds. You really nailed it. Actually, these are legitimate wood screws. Well done and thank you. Rise up everyone. Go out, be the spark of joy someone needs. I'm Coy Wire, and we are CNN 10.