ABC Listen. Hello there, my friends. My name is Ruby and you're listening to News Time.
Hello. Hey, Ruby. This week we are kicking some goals here on Newstime.
We're going to hear from a young soccer player who's gearing up for a unique competition.
We'll also dig up a pearler of a fossil in the outback and head to a sports event for robots in our wow of the week Okay, I'm feeling warmed up.
Should we get proceedings underway? Let's go.
Story number five. Who's your favourite professional athlete?
I like Simone Biles because I like gymnastics.
I like the Matodas. I like the same car.
LeBron James and Messi. Messi is one of the best soccer players in the world.
Athletes work hard to be at their best and that means a lot of them get paid very well.
Not too long ago, Kokafa and Narungga man and AFL player Naziah Wangani-Malera signed a contract extension to stay with his team, St Kilda, for another two years.
Have a guess how much he earns each football season.
$3,000 I would say probably like $5,000 to $10,000 every season he might earn more the more games he wins Good guesses, but Naziah will earn $2 million every season.
That's more money than any AFL player's ever been paid for a season of football.
Two million is a lot. That's pretty crazy for two million, even though he's...
Not that famous around the world. Naziah is a very good footy player.
He's accurate with his handballs and his kicks. and he always involves his teammates.
Even though other teams try to get Naziah to switch, he decided to stay with St Kilda, the team that first drafted him into the AFL.
Maybe because the players on the team are like his friends and it feels like he belongs there basically.
He's probably been there for a long time.
Other Indigenous players say Naziah's deal sends a message to young Aboriginal football players across the country. and it gives them something to aim for.
Work hard and you might just play at the top level like Naziah.
I think that they would be really proud that they're being heard and that they're getting so much money.
Congratulations, Naziah. For this story, we're heading to a teeny tiny town in outback Queensland.
It's called Richmond and it's become famous for its fossil pits.
Fossil hunters travel from across the globe to Richmond in the hopes of unearthing a once in a lifetime find.
But there's a catch. They're only allowed to dig if they donate any important scientific discoveries back to the town museum.
And a few years ago, one tourist found something very rare.
Is that an avocado seed? It looks like an egg.
It could be like maybe a fossil from a dinosaur.
Something that looks extinct and something that has been in there for a long time.
This, my friends, is a fossil pearl. So was it a pole that turned into a fossil?
Yes. Scientists have spent two years taking a close look at this fossil pearl.
It's only a little bit bigger than a marble.
They recently worked out it's 100 million years old.
That's definitely older than my great-great-grandma.
When they found that they probably have no idea what that lump is, but When they found out it was a fossil pearl, they would have been very proud.
This precious fossil pearl would have formed inside a now extinct fossil. distinct giant clam way back when Richmond and a lot of outback Queensland was covered by an inland sea.
100 million years later, now it's sitting in the town museum alongside lots of other fossils.
We can find out what's in them by studying them, like poo, like we can find out what Animals ate and by their shape, it could like tell us what new dinosaurs that we haven't discovered yet look like.
Ooh, maybe. I might just have to book a trip to the outback and have a dig myself.
Okay, so you've probably heard of the Olympics and the Paralympics, where people from different countries get together every four years to compete in different sports.
But have you heard of the Deaflympics? The Olympics for the Deaf.
The Deaflympics are recognised by the International Olympic Committee and they've been held in different countries for more than a hundred years.
All athletes in the Deaflympics have hearing loss and they're not allowed to wear hearing aids or cochlear implants while they're competing.
They would have to have like different rules and they would have to use sign language to help them.
Instead of having like whistles and stuff like that, they should have other things like flags maybe to indicate.
17-year-old Ruby Miller from Leeton in regional New South Wales has made the Australian women's soccer team, which will compete at the 2025 Japan Deaflympics.
She says she's always wanted to represent Australia, but playing soccer with hearing loss?
Not easy. You can't hear anyone from behind you, because I have to use my vision, my peripheral vision.
You've got to be aware of your surroundings.
It's not just training that Ruby needs to do.
She also needs to raise $10,000 just to get to Japan.
Because while Australian Olympians and Paralympians get funding from the Australian Sports Commission, Ruby and her teammates need to pay their own way to get to the Deaflympics.
I think it's unfair that she has to pay for herself.
She has to get $10,000 more because she to be mainly good at sport but then she also needs to be um have a lot of money yeah When you need to spend a lot of time training, well, that doesn't leave much time to fundraise.
Ruby has been busy selling socks and her brother has been selling firewood.
She's hoping that more people will donate so that she will get on that plane to Japan in November.
If you stay strong, you'll get there. Keep raising money because you can do it and I hope you win at the Daffron Picks.
If you've ever moved house, you would know it is a big job.
You've got to squeeze everything you own into boxes pop them in a truck and drive them to your new home.
Now imagine if you needed to move a building like your school classroom.
How would you go about that? I'd probably like start grabbing all the furniture first and then like move it and then get a bunch of people and move it around.
Well, I think it would be like a big, big hassle.
So I just like. create another school moving a building is not a job for the faint-hearted Over in Sweden, there's a town called Kiruna where workers have just moved a 113-year-old red timber church to a new spot five kilometres away.
And they moved it in one piece on the back of a very big trailer, very slowly and very carefully.
They had this. thing that it was on that had wheels.
No one was pushing it because that would be heavy.
It was like a mix of a truck and a drive base plate with loads of wheels.
Because this church is so big, workers had to get the road ready for its trip.
They removed lamp posts and traffic lights and even a bridge so the church could fit.
After two days and a cost of $1 billion, the church reached its new home and lots of people could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
So why exactly did they go to all this effort to move the church?
The church took up too much space and people wanted to build things that are useful maybe they wanted to build like houses or apartments there maybe there was like something wrong with that space bingo Workers in that town around the church have been mining iron ore for more than a hundred years.
That's meant fissures or cracks in the ground could damage the town's water and electricity supply.
So lots of the town's buildings are being moved out of there.
Well, I think it's good that they did that because it probably would disrupt the people in church.
Like imagine if you are just in church and then all of a sudden you hear this. being like from the mines that would be disruptive i'll say Okay, friends, it is time for... Wow of the Week.
This story made me go wow because there's robots in the Olympics.
A brand new world sporting event has just finished up over in China.
Competitors gathered together in stadiums to run, kick, box, And fall apart.
Okay, that was weird. Like the guy fell over and his head was dangling from his neck.
Like the robots. Why don't you just get real humans to do it, not robots?
Yes, that's right. There are no humans in this event.
This was the world's first robot humanoid games.
Humanoids are robots that look and move like humans do.
There's loads of robots. They probably made it like the Robot Olympics.
There's no point in winning it because the robots Like humans, they won't get anything from it.
There were more than 500 humanoid robots from 16 countries. including the US, Germany and Japan, and they competed in sports like athletics, football, table tennis and even a dancing competition.
AI is taking over the world. The organisers of the Games wanted to use the event to see just how advanced robotic technology has become.
They say that sport is a good way to test robot decision making and movement.
But it would seem like these robots have a fair way to go.
There was some falling over, knocking into humans by mistake, and a bit of malfunctioning.
They're being programmed to box like humans, run like humans, play soccer like humans, but they're not actually that good. barely know what they're doing.
Still, there have been some incredible advances in technology when it comes to humanoid robots, and the industry just keeps on growing.
It makes you wonder what the future might be like.
Robots in the future are going to be very different.
Maybe for like entertainment? Maybe because like butlers and stuff cost a lot of money with robots.
It will probably be like cheaper. Imagine that. attention robot butler cook my dinner please not today ruby hmm robot butler might need some improvements But with that, my friends, we've made it.
We are at the end of the countdown. Woohoo!
Thanks, Ruby. You are so welcome. I'll catch you next week for another action-packed news time.
Bye, Ruby. Bye. See you later. or as they say in urdu the national language of pakistan alwira Newstime is an ABC Kids Listen podcast.
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