ABC Listen. Hello, friends. It's Ruby here and you're listening to an episode of Newstime.
Hey, Ruby. Hello. This week on Newstime, we're going to track down a backpack-wearing bird.
We'll also crash down to Earth in a rocket and think like fish in our wow of the week.
What do you reckon? Should we dive in? Let's get going.
Story number five. As a kid, you'd know there are lots of places to make new friends.
At school, in a sports team or in a concert band.
But how about grown-ups? How do they make friends?
My dad usually makes friends at his work.
My dad normally makes friends at my church.
So the way that my mum made friends was if she was invited to some sort of restaurant or pub or something and then she met some new people.
One place where grown-ups can make friends is called a men's shed.
In the last 30 years, there have been about 1,200 men's sheds opening across Australia.
What does it look like? Building sheds? Ladies do it, mates often.
To help children or to help them make tools.
They're places that men can come together to do woodwork and fix things that are broken, like lawnmowers, or fix bikes for school kids.
They're also places for men to make friends and support each other through tough times.
So maybe you tell everyone so they can cheer you up and help you calm down and make sure you're okay if something happened to you.
Let it out so you feel better. You might not feel sad anymore.
Not very long ago, some women decided they should have their own version of a men's shed too, so that they could do woodwork and art projects and look out for each other.
Now there are 60 women's sheds in Australia, including one that's just opened up in the Queensland city of Cairns.
It's called a she-shed. Having fun like outside because it looks outdoors and then she looks very happy drilling that thing with nails.
There are plenty of women who'd love to create she-sheds in their area, but finding a space to set up doesn't come cheap.
So there's a call for more government funding.
Friendship, new skills and good support.
Isn't it amazing what you can find in a shed?
Story number four. Off the coast of Victoria, there's a place called Phillip Island.
You might know it for its famed penguin population.
That brings about 70,000 visitors every year.
But there's another bird scurrying around this island scrub that might just steal the spotlight.
It looks brown and like a hazel colour and it looks very tall and big.
It has a big black beak. scary green eyes.
This, my friends, is the bush stone curlew.
They're quiet creatures and very well camouflaged by their bush surroundings.
And right now they're wandering around Phillip Island for the first time in 40 years.
Maybe they went on like a little holiday or something.
Maybe they moved because it was too cold in one place where they lived and then The next was where maybe they would have to have babies.
Maybe they might have went to a different island or something.
These birds didn't leave by choice. They disappeared after being hunted by foxes.
The good news is that eight years ago, after a lot of work, scientists managed to eradicate, that means get rid of, all of the foxes on Phillip Island.
Now researchers have introduced 12 bushstone curlews and they've got tiny little backpacks.
Why would they put backpacks on them? Food!
A radar to see what they're doing or like something dangerous attacks them.
To track their location. Yes, you've got it.
Inside each of these little backpacks is a GPS tracker.
Researchers are using them to follow each of the curlews' movements and give them health checks every three months.
To keep them safe! Yep, and so far so good.
The curlews are healthy and enjoying their brand new predator-free home.
Story number three. A few weeks ago, over in Switzerland, there was a lot of dribbling going on.
No, it wasn't a baby get-together, although there were a few tantrums.
It was the world's best soccer teams facing off in the Women's European Championship.
England and Spain made it through to the final, with the England Lionesses taking home the win.
England's goalkeeper Hannah Hampton was named player of the match.
She made two saves in the penalty shootout and that secured the win for her team.
They would feel happy, really happy and maybe celebrated for like a party.
They might have felt happy and excited but maybe I'm a bit sad for the other team.
Hannah was born with an eye condition called strabismus, which means she doesn't have any depth perception.
What's depth perception? It's how your eyes work out how far away objects are, and the distance between them.
Hannah says if she pours a glass of water, she always needs to hold the glass in one hand, because if she doesn't, the water won't go into the glass, it'll spill on her feet.
Having had strabismus her whole life, Hannah was told she shouldn't play soccer.
It will be quite hard because you need to know where the ball is if the other team shoots.
That's right. And as a goalie, Hannah's job is to stop balls from reaching the goal behind her.
So she needs to know exactly when to leap and save a goal.
Hannah had some operations to fix her vision, but she still finds depth perception difficult.
As we know though, she's worked hard and never given up and that commitment has helped her team score the Euro win.
So maybe just try to be yourself and I learned that no one can judge you how you are and I think she made her team really proud and think she's different and it's okay.
Story number two. Over the 10 years that we've been running Newstime, you've heard plenty of stories about rockets blasting off into space.
And so you'd know it takes a lot of work to get to liftoff.
A very, very long time and you would have to spend a lot of money.
About 5,000 mils of dynamite. Not dynamite, but there are still plenty of fireworks.
Recently in Queensland, a company attempted to launch an Australian-made orbital rocket.
That's a spacecraft with no crew on board designed to stay in space for at least one orbit.
It looks humongous. Maybe they felt really, really, really, really scared and they might have felt proud.
It might have took hours to build. People travelled from far and wide to watch this rocket launch from a distance.
The countdown began, a big blast took place and plumes of smoke shot into the air.
It looks really big and there's like a lot of steam and I think they took how it was spilled out.
The rocket lifted off from home soil, but it only stayed in the air for 14 seconds.
Then it crashed down back to earth. But that didn't go everywhere.
Up, up, up, up, up, down. When the rocket went up, you could see that one of the engines were smoking, so it went a bit up and then it fell down.
Even though the rocket didn't quite launch, the company that built it said they're happy with the attempt.
It was a major step forward for Australia's space industry and they are not giving up on their space dream.
Good job! Although it stayed up in the sky for 14 seconds.
Um, you got it up, so maybe try again and it might go to space.
That's right. Keep aiming for the stars.
And now, my friends, back down to Earth for our... Wow of the Week.
This story made me go wow because it was really fun to learn about stuff that is really new.
If you've been to Sydney Harbour recently, maybe cruising around on a ferry, you might have noticed a bit of extra colour splashed around the edges of the water.
I can probably see huge chunks of gold. Yes, goldy yellow.
I see it too. As well as green and red and grey concrete squares.
They've been stuck onto sea walls right around the harbour at different tide heights.
Maybe the wall was breaking and then there wasn't as much water and all of the animals were dying.
Researchers from Macquarie University have been thinking about how animals see the world and how sea creatures see their surroundings.
They realised that around the harbour there are a lot of bland grey sea walls and that most shorelines have colours like yellow and green mixed in with the grey.
Because maybe then it would just be a bit boring for the sea creatures because there would only be one colour to go on.
The researchers set to work in their backyards, making coloured tiles they hoped might help sea life.
Why did they have to do that? And they probably spent about $5,000 million.
It didn't cost much money to make these tiles at all.
And the experiment worked. Algae and barnacles have grown on the tiles and fish have enjoyed chowing down.
It's important to take care of the ocean for food to eat.
For food for the fish, sharks, clams, sea urchins.
Scientists have discovered that green algae and barnacles are more likely to grow on red tiles and brown algae choose to grow on green tiles.
Now the team are placing more tiles on walls around Botany Bay in Sydney's south to revive marine life there.
Well done scientists on a truly fishy finding.
Okay, friends, time to disembark at the end of a very colourful countdown.
Thank you. Thanks, Ruby. You are so very welcome.
Let's do it all again next time. Bye, Ruby.
Have a good day. Ciao for now. See you later, Ruby.
See you later. Or, as they say in Germany, tschüss.
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