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ABC Listen. Hello, my friends.
It's Ruby here, and you're listening to News Time.
Hello, Ruby. G'day, mate.
It almost feels like we should rename News Time this week to Zoo Time.
We're reporting on burping cows, comforting turtles and some lucky pups at a pet rescue.
What do you say? Let's hear that news.
Story number five. Selwyn Nutsley loves dogs.
He loves them so much that he has four of them.
Mindy, Lindy, Rover and Buddy.
In the small rural town where he lives in Queensland, which is called Emerald, Selwyn is known as the patron of pets.
A patron is someone who gives support to something, and Selwyn's given a lot of support to his local pet rescue charity.
He's been raising money to donate to the charity by collecting empty bottles and containers and recycling them.
Do you recycle stuff instead of just throwing it out and putting it in landfill?
You get ten cents for each bottle.
If you do a lot, you might get like 50 or 30.
Yep, that's it. In most states around Australia, you can earn ten cents for each empty container that you recycle.
So Selwyn spends his spare time collecting them.
He puts in more than 40 hours a week, and he's already managed to recycle a million containers.
Those ten cent payments have added up.
Selwyn has donated $100 ,000 to his favourite pet rescue charity.
It's a great cause.
It's good because you're also raising money for charity and helping the planet at the same time.
The people at the charity are very grateful for Selwyn's hard work.
They say that without his effort and donations, they might have had to close a couple of years ago.
Selwyn's donations mean that more animals can be taken care of and given a chance to have a happy life.
Because, like dogs, might not have someone to live with, I think they feel quite lucky that they are at that pet rescue and say to him, Rif, rif!
Thanks for your hard work, Selwyn.
The canines of Queensland are lucky to have you.
Story number four. How much do you know about cow burps and cow farts?
That they stink a lot of farts.
The burps will make me, like, be very loud and the farts will make me very stinky.
You're right. But did you know the gas that comes out of cows contains something called methane?
Too much methane in the atmosphere?
Well, that's not good for our environment.
On some farms in New South Wales and Queensland, farmers have installed cow breath testing machines.
The cows are lured into the machine by a sweet smell.
When they're in the machines, they...
Well, they do what cows love to do.
They burp and they fart.
And while they do, those emissions, the gas that comes out, they're measured for methane.
It helps the farmers know how healthy their animals are and whether they're producing too much methane.
I think it's good, because they're reducing all the methane.
Like, they're a scientist farmer.
Pretty good for the environment and the world and thank you to the farmers.
The farmers learn lots of useful information from these machines.
They know whether certain animals emit more methane than others.
And they can find out if the amounts they're eating makes a difference.
They can even tell whether a cow is pregnant just from its breath.
And if they know that their cow is going to be healthy, if it's healthy, they know that there's going to be less methane.
A farmer from Cowra named John says this machine has helped him make choices about his cows.
He's learnt from the machine that bigger cows produce more emissions, so he's going to plan to have smaller cows on his property from now on.
John and the other farmers that use the machines, they're hoping this special technology will help farmers take better care of the environment.
Story number three!
Dr Louise Woodward is a paediatrician.
That's a doctor who looks after children.
When she was setting up her doctor's office in Darwin in the Northern Territory, she heard about an abandoned long -necked turtle.
Dr Louise was told the turtle wouldn't be able to survive by itself in the wild, so she gave it a home in a tank at her office.
They're cute. He looked very cute.
And he looks like a happy turtle.
The turtle was named Timmy.
Dr Louise noticed that Timmy would often press himself up against the walls of his tank when there were kids around.
It seemed like Timmy the turtle wanted to interact with the kids, so Dr Louise let him out of the tank.
Soon, Timmy became a bit of a doctor's office celebrity.
The kids loved seeing him during their visits, and it made going to the doctor an exciting thing to do, because it meant they might get to pat Timmy.
Really small and it looks like he's very calm.
I would love holding Timmy the turtle, because most turtle showers feel quite satisfying, and I'd like stroking that.
Jasmine is one of Dr Louise's patients, and she loves spending time with Timmy the turtle.
She says it makes her feel happy, and Jasmine's mum says Timmy the turtle is also a helpful distraction.
Because if they, like, have like a broken leg, like they can hold him, and turtles are normally like soft on the shell, so they can like rub it and then like, maybe they won't hurt.
Some patients come to visit the practice after school, even when they don't have an appointment, just to see how Timmy's going.
Remember, it's best that most wild animals stay in the wild, so you shouldn't go picking up animals unless a vet or a grown -up tells you it's OK.
Story number two. Have you heard of wing defence?
Or how about goal attack?
These are positions in a sport called netball, a game that more than a million Australians play.
I've seen netball. It's sort of like basketball, but it doesn't have the back -forward thing.
You have to learn how to get the netball to go to the other player.
Netball is super popular.
Aussies can't get enough of it.
Recently, a new netball competition started up.
It's called the First Nations Tournament.
Netball is under the age of 23 from every state and territory.
They all came together and met up in Naam, Melbourne, to compete in the tournament.
Every player was an indigenous Australian, and the competition was designed to highlight the talent in netball's First Nations communities.
The coaches and officials and umpires, they were all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, too.
I think they thought it was fun, excited and happy and proud because they get to represent their state.
The event was held over three days.
The competition was hotly contested.
In the end, it was the team from Queensland that came out on top.
They beat the team from South Australia in the final, 37 points to 35.
At the end of the game, they can high -five each other and say, Good job, and keep on trying to keep it up.
Queensland player and murawari woman Lily Covey was named the player of the tournament.
She says the tournament is only going to grow from here.
Second place winner, South Australian player Mia Jones, said playing with the girls and representing their communities made it just that little bit more special.
Congratulations, netball stars.
We'll see you at the next comp.
And now it's time for...
..Wow Of The Week. This story made me go, wow, because it's very cool, but it's also mysterious.
We weren't knowing what it was, like scientists.
A keen camper named Joel Lapointe was planning a trip.
He was looking for the perfect spot to set up a tent.
He was using an app with a map on it to check out an area of wilderness in Quebec, in the country Canada.
Zooming in and searching around for where his next adventure might be.
While Joel was searching, something strange caught his eye.
It looked like a little oval.
It looks like a massive oval with, like, scratches in it.
The thing Joel spotted was round and jagged.
It looked like a circle of tiny mountains.
He saved a picture of it and sent it to Dr Pierre Rouchet, a geophysicist from France.
A geophysicist is someone who studies planet Earth.
Dr Pierre thinks these tiny mountains may have been created after a meteorite smashed into the Earth.
That would mean Joel has stumbled across a crater.
He was probably pretty amazed, and I would be, too.
Thousands of years ago, there was a rock that hit Earth, and it made a huge crater, and that might have been it.
More than thousands, it was millions of years ago that this crater is likely to have been formed.
It's not confirmed just yet, because scientists haven't been able to officially visit the site.
A couple of scientists have had unofficial visits, though, and they say it looks pretty likely this could be the first crater of this size discovered in more than 10 years.
Yeah, I thought it was really cool.
Dr Pierre and his team of scientists have been telling the world about their probable crater discovery and saying a big thank you to Joel, the map -exploring camper, for his help along the way.
And we certainly don't need a map to tell us where we are now.
We have found ourselves at the end of today's countdown.
That was great. Thank you.
Thanks, Ruby. You are very welcome.
I'll catch you all next week with five brand -new stories.
Bye. Bye, Ruby. See you later, Ruby.
See you later, or, as they say in Gamilaroi, yaloo.
