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Hello, friends.
It's Ruby here and you're listening to News Time.
Hi there, Ruby.
Hello.
On this week's News Time menu, we're going to hear about a park designed to keep koalas safe.
We're going to swim upstream to meet a blood-sucking fish, and we'll finish up with a rather large helping of dessert in our wow of the week.
What do you think?
Is your serviette on your lap?
Are you ready to feast?
Let's go.
Story number five.
We're so excited.
Wow, she's excited.
Something you hear about quite a lot here on Newstime is the problem of plastic pollution.
There are millions of plastic bags, bottles and straws bobbing around in our oceans and waterways.
And when it comes to the very big task of cleaning it all up Well, it can be hard to know where to begin.
Use the landfill in the water to make like art out of it and like octopuses and make stuff out of like bottle caps.
Maybe you could use ships and have a net and scoop up all the rubbish.
Maybe no littering.
Putting your rubbish in the right bin is the perfect place to start.
Over.
In Amsterdam, a city famous for its beautiful canals, workers have spent years tackling litter by scooping it out of the water with big nets.
But recently a company's come up with an invention that is much quicker and more effective.
It's a robot and it's called Waste Shark.
I think it's like an underwater car and then it drives around and it scoops up all of the rubbish.
I think all the waves push the rubbish into the hole and then it sucks off and then it goes into a pipe and it goes to a place where they make stuff.
This machine looks like a small whale shark.
It floats along on the surface of the water with a big, open mouth, searching for plastic and microplastic and algae.
And when it finds any, it gobbles it up.
And once this robot is full of waste, it swims back to the shore to dispose of it properly.
That's pretty cool because then it knows to go back.
Yes, and this keen cleaning machine can collect 500 kilograms of waste in one day.
That's a pile about as heavy as a grand piano.
That's amazing.
The company's been hard at work creating a bigger model so that it can be sent out into the ocean too.
It makes you wonder what real sharks must think when they see this robot swimming around.
Maybe they'll go, ooh, that might be yummy.
This might be a friend.
Well, if it's helping clean up the water, it is every fish's best friend.
Australia is full of amazing native animals, and one that's had a bit of a hard time lately is the koala.
They have lots of sharp claws and they only sleep until the daytime and wake up in the night time.
They climb over anything that's a tree and they're enemies with green ants.
A few years ago, a report found that koalas could become extinct in New South Wales if the government doesn't do something.
Knowing how important koalas are, politicians got to work quickly to plan something called the Great Koala National Park.
A national park is like a forest?
That's right.
National parks are big areas of land designed to protect plants and animals that live there.
In the last few weeks, the state government announced that this new national park would be New South Wales' biggest.
It's going to stretch from Grafton in the north to Kempsey in the south.
It's an area home to more than 12,000 koalas and 100 different threatened species.
The koalas would be happy that no one would be invading where they would live.
They would have a happy life.
The Great Koala National Park is still being planned, but this last week we saw the end of timber logging.
That's where companies cut down trees within the space that's planned for the park.
Dedicated Aboriginal rangers are going to work at the park and use and share First Nations knowledge to help care for country.
That's pretty cool.
The state government is hoping that people from all over the world will come and visit the park and walk through the Australian bush and maybe even spot a koala or two.
They're just visiting to see them.
Exactly.
Story number three.
You might remember that a little while ago here on Newstime, we spoke about a sport called boccia.
It's played by athletes in the Paralympics who have a significant physical impairment affecting all four of their limbs.
I think there were flying boys in Chelsea who can throw the ball the furthest.
Close!
The aim of the game is to get your coloured ball as near as possible to a white ball on a court.
Some people can throw their coloured balls.
Other people use equipment.
Here's Aussie athlete Jamison Leeson explaining how she plays.
Because of my disability, I can't throw the balls onto the court far enough.
For me, my main piece of equipment is called a ramp, which is basically like a giant slippery dip that the balls roll down.
And I use a long stick to help me push the balls off when I can't reach.
I have a ramp operator named Jazz who helps me in every single way, and she's a very good teammate with me.
It makes a good sport for people that can still use their wheelchair.
I think it's to test how accurate you are.
Jamison has just had a big win at the 2025 World Boche Cup in the South Korean city of Seoul.
In the Pairs final, Jamison and fellow Aussie Dan Michel beat Poland 8-0.
That scored them a gold medal.
Happy, happy, happy.
Yes, and it's just what Jamison and Dan need, because next year they'll return to Seoul for the World Boccia Championships.
And then it's only a few years until the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles.
Good luck winning the championship.
Congratulations, Jamison and Dan.
Glad you got the win.
And I bet you had a bowl in the process.
In Western Australia, a very strange-looking creature has shown up.
Ew!
Why does it have so many teeth?
It's a boneless fish that looks a little bit like an eel.
It's ugly.
They're pretty rare to see these days, but this creature has been around for more than 360 million years.
Some people call it a living fossil.
That's more than the dinosaurs, and that's when I was even alive.
And this creature, it likes to suck blood.
Why does it look like a plunger that has an eye on it?
Looks like a stick, but with teeth.
Okay, come on.
What's something kind we can say about this creature?
Creepy and weird and disgusting.
Okay, let's start again.
In Western Australia.
Strange looking creature has shown up swimming in the margaret river.
This, my friends, is the pouched lamprey.
These ancient creatures used to be seen a fair bit in western australian rivers, but lately they've been hard to find.
After a good winter of rain, the lampreys have decided to make a comeback.
They've been hanging out in antarctica.
You'll never guess how they made the trip back.
They caught a ride north by sucking on the backs of whales.
What?
I think the whale would be sad.
Well, I'll tell you who is not sad, the residents of WA.
You might think they'd be scared of a slippery creature with hundreds of teeth, but they're actually happy to see them back in the river, especially because they're here to lay eggs.
Let me assure you, lampreys cannot hurt humans.
Scientists think they can actually teach us a lot about the ancient past.
They say you can't judge a book by its cover.
And in this case, I guess we could say that you can't judge a blood sucking fish by its teeth.
It's many, many pointy teeth.
OK, friends, time to jump out of the water because it's time for... Wow of the Week.
This story made me go wow because I don't know how they had time for all the strudels.
We're going to hop aboard a plane now and fly to the country of Croatia, where the residents of a village named Jaskovo have broken a world record using flour apples and a lot of hard work, they've created the world's longest line of apple strudels.
It's like a strudel of apple flavour.
Maybe apple flavour covered in strudel.
It's yummy, it sure is.
Apple strudel is a pastry dessert filled with spiced apple, and it tastes delicious warm out of the oven with a bit of ice cream or custard.
Oh, i'm getting hungry.
I think i could eat it all by myself.
Well, i don't think anyone would be able to eat the number of strudels that the townsfolk of yuskovo served up.
They used more than two tonnes of flour and three tonnes of apples to make nearly 9000 baked strudels.
When they placed them end to end in a line, the strudels stretched more than three kilometres.
That's about half the height of Mount Kilimanjaro, the world's tallest freestanding mountain.
So what do you think they did with all those baked treats?
They sort of like glued them together to make a dog strudel jacket.
So then the dogs can eat the strudels.
Every plane it's going to fly above the sea and it has a whole bag of strudels and they open the door and they go.
Fly babies, then the jellyfish race.
Hmm, I can assure you none of these strudels were given to jellyfish, but they were donated to different organisations around the town and given to people in need.
Now, if you're thinking of filling your upcoming school holidays with a world record attempt, maybe give the strudel one a miss.
Imagine all the washing up.
And that's it for the countdown, my friends.
Hmm, for some reason I feel like snacking on an apple.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ruby.
You are so welcome.
Catch you next time.
Bye, Ruby.
See you later.
Or as they say in Croatia, the home of nearly 9,000 yummy strudels, Doviđenja.
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