ABC Listen. Hello there.
My name is Ruby and you're listening to Newstime.
Hi, Ruby. Hi. With your help, I'm going to count down five news stories from here in Australia and right around the world.
Get ready for big dinosaurs in small towns, some rats running amok in treetops and footy fanatics flying to the other side of the world.
What do you reckon?
Ready to go? I think I'm maybe ready.
Story number five. How would you like to practise your favourite sport with some of the best in the world?
The best training ever.
Messi and Ronaldo teach me really good soccer drills.
That would be pretty cool.
For some keen soccer players in Wollongong in New South Wales, that opportunity to train with the best, it was a dream that actually came true.
It would be really joyful and I would be going.
It's so good inside the head.
Soccer players at Worrawong High School are part of something called the Real Madrid Foundation Program.
Real Madrid is a Spanish soccer club and it's one of the best in the world.
This program aims to encourage kids to pick up healthy habits like eating well and getting enough exercise.
One of the perks of the program is the opportunity to fly to Spain to train at Real Madrid's awesome facilities.
These students at Wurrawong were very keen to go but there was just one problem.
Flights to Spain, oof, they are pretty expensive.
So these kids had to find ways to start saving.
Make shops that could sell soccer balls.
And crochet lots of things and then sell it on the streets.
One student, Lexi, started working a part -time job to save up for her ticket.
She says it was well worth it.
A group of students and teachers travelled to Spain to play and train with some of the best coaches in the world.
When it comes to the actual game, they have mastered all the hard tricks.
That's the idea. Lexi and her friends say the program taught them more than just soccer skills.
It also taught them about the importance of working hard for a goal and budgeting their money.
Of course, being able to boot a ball like Messi or Ronaldo, that would be a handy lesson to learn too.
Good on you! Story number four.
A species of giant rodent has just been photographed for the very first time.
Mysterious and shadowish.
Mysterious climbing creature.
A long, spiky hair that blends in with the dark night.
That is a terrific description.
The subalpine woolly rat is a shaggy -furred rodent about the size of a small dog.
You can find them in Indonesia, West Papua and Papua New Guinea.
They're not endangered.
There are plenty of them scurrying around.
But for some reason, they'd never been caught on camera in Papua New Guinea, until now.
That is so exciting.
Would win a world record for catching the hardest animal to find.
Scientists knew what the woolly rat looked like.
There were specimens of it in museums and drawings and paintings in old scientific books.
A biologist named Frantisek spent months exploring the mountainous forests of Papua New Guinea, hoping to finally bag a happy snap of this mysterious mountain dweller.
Rats can dig. They could dig underground when the camera comes.
They blend in with the darkness and the environment.
Well, that would explain why it took so long to get a picture.
Sub -Alpine woolly rats are nocturnal, and they're a dark grey colour, so they blend in with their night -time surroundings.
surroundings they're also very quiet that doesn't make things any easier the scientific latin name for these animals is malomus istapantap which means it's on the top right in the local language because it lives on the top right of one of the countries lives in the top right of treetops yep they gave it that nickname because rats live so high up in the mountains far away from people And that might be a good thing.
Imagine seeing a rat the size of a dog at your house.
I would run for my life and scream.
I would be freaking out.
I'm running out the door really fast. Even though this rat is a harmless herbivore, I don't blame you.
Story number three!
This is a story about a South Australian town that's welcomed an unlikely mascot.
If you had to choose a mascot for where you live, what animal would you pick?
Ring -tailed possum.
I would choose something that's native to our whole town, so it proves that we love our town.
I would choose a shark.
Well, the people of Melang have an unofficial mascot, a giant Saltasaurus dinosaur named Milano. Dinosaur?
That is cool and weird at the same time.
Milano the Saltasaurus is eight metres long.
That's the length of two cars.
And pretty tall too.
Millions of years ago, the Saltasaurus roamed the lands of Argentina in modern -day South America.
So nowhere near South Australia.
But this Saltasaurus is for decoration.
It sits in the front paddock of the property of its new owner, Brittany Vogelsang.
The massive monument made its way to the town of Malang on the back of a big trailer.
I was going, stop the car, look behind you.
There's a big dinosaur.
If that was a real dinosaur, everyone would die and go...
Thankfully, Milano is not a real dinosaur and is not out to eat people.
Instead, the locals are hoping the new member of their community will make people want to come and visit and attract people from all over to their tiny town.
The plan seems to be working already.
Visitors from nearby towns have made their way to Mulang to meet Milano. They're hoping to dress Milano up for Christmas, for Halloween and for footy finals too.
It seems this unlikely mascot is here to stay.
Don't let kids climb on it because if it's a real dinosaur disguised as a statue...
..story two is go. In the Northern Territory, some Indigenous medical patients are getting their cataracts removed.
What's a cataract? I'm glad you asked.
A cataract is when the lens of someone's eye gets very cloudy.
A cataract might look like a whitish -blue splodge on someone's eye.
It can make it really difficult to see.
Yes, I have heard of that.
It's like your eyes are made of glass and wind goes into them.
The good news is that most of the time cataracts are treatable.
They can be removed with surgery to help people see more easily.
That is awesome that you can have surgeries.
It sure is. But for people who live in remote or rural places in Australia, getting to a hospital for cataract surgery isn't always easy.
So often cataracts are left to grow and get worse.
The Indigenous and Remote Eye Service came to the town of Catherine in the Northern Territory and invited indigenous patients with cataracts from remote communities to come on in to get some surgery.
In just two days, the doctors removed cataracts from 27 eyes, helping their patients see again.
One of the patients is Mildred Hector, a Billinara woman from Nijpuroo.
She says that having cataracts made hunting and fishing pretty difficult, so having them removed will make it easier for Mildred to do just what she needs to.
When they're trying to fish and hunt, they're like, oh, what's that animal?
Is that an animal? The doctors are planning to come back again regularly over the next couple of years.
They say it's awesome to see just how quickly people's lives are improved by this surgery.
People who've had their cataracts removed often go back to their communities and encourage others to give the procedure a go too.
Explore the world even better than before.
And now, my friends, it is time for...
Wow of the Week. This story made me go wow because I liked it.
Cockatoos are very clever creatures.
In fact, previously on Newstime, we've talked about how they figured out how to open bins to poke around for food.
But now some cockatoos in a western Sydney park have learnt a new skill.
How to make a kookaburra stop laughing.
Learn how to go toilet in the toilet.
Good guesses! But no, some sulfur crested cockatoos have learnt how to use a bubbler.
Bubblers, also called water fountains, in this Sydney park, they're twisty ones and the cockatoos have had to think hard about how to twist the handle to take a drink.
Turning on a bubbler and make his claws like...
So they use their claws to turn the bubbler on and then use their beaks to drink the water.
Ecologist Lucy Applin is one of the scientists who figured out exactly what these birds were doing.
The cockatoos hold onto the bubbler with their foot and then they twist, but because they're not as strong as humans, they have to lean their whole weight on this twisted tap while they angle their beak for a drink.
To be honest, it doesn't look super comfortable.
It's probably not the easiest position to get into, but about 200 birds have been seen contorting themselves like this just for a drink.
So they might want to try something new.
Because the bubbler has clean water.
This water is nice.
The coolest part is these birds are teaching each other.
More than half of the birds in the local area are now using bubblers to get a drink, whether they're male, female, young or old.
Cockatoos have pretty big brains compared to the size of their bodies, which gives them brain power to learn these new tricks.
Day, Jessica. I'm going to follow the steps that the people do.
I wonder what these quirky birds will learn next.
And there you have it, my friends.
Five fantastic stories and just a few feathers.
Thank you, Ruby, so much. You are so welcome.
I'll catch you next week.
Bye, Ruby. Bye. See you later.
Or as they say in Dutch, doei.
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