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Hello, friends.
It's Ruby here and you're listening to an episode of News Time.
Hi, Ruby.
Hello.
On this week's News Time, we're going to play a game that's saving a language from extinction.
We're going to journey deep into the jungle, searching for something that humans haven't seen for 10 years.
And then we'll blast off into space with some very green passages in our wow of the week.
What do you say?
Are you ready for our countdown?
Let's go.
Story number five.
Summer is finally here and that means another season of cricket is underway.
You've got to throw the ball and then someone has to run around.
I've watched cricket and basically someone just throws the ball and you've got to hit it and then someone catches it.
Cricket is played in matches that are all different lengths.
There's the big bash league, where the games are played in a few hours a one-day match, which happens in well one day, And the most traditional form of cricket, which is the test match.
That play can last up to five days.
That's actually very long.
Five days allows each team to play two full innings.
It's also a good test of endurance and skill for the players.
But sometimes these matches don't run for five days.
In fact, Australia played so well in this year's first test match of the Ashes series against England that the match was over in just two days.
That is crazy.
That should be like the world record of Australia.
It's pretty impressive, but an early finish didn't suit everyone.
Like the people who'd bought tickets to watch the last few days or travelled all the way from England to cheer on their team.
It also created some problems for the organisers at the Perth Stadium.
They'd ordered tons of food to feed all those hungry fans in the crowd.
And all of a sudden, they didn't need it anymore.
What do you think they did with all of that food?
Food fight.
They ate it all.
Well actually, the organisers at the Perth Stadium donated all the food to a charity named OzHarvest.
OzHarvest works to rescue food from going to waste and passes it along to charities and schools and those in need right across Western Australia.
OzHarvest said they had never had a donation this big in Western Australia.
That was good, what they did.
It's wonderful that hundreds of kilos of fruit and veggies and bread have been put to good use.
Story number four.
Every December, dictionaries around the world announce their Word of the Year.
It's usually a word or term that's entered our language that year, or a word that reflects what's happened through the year.
Australia's very own Macquarie dictionary has revealed its Word of the Year for 2025.
Really, it's two words.
And it is...
AI slop.
I've heard about it, but I forgot what it was called.
AI is when you get something and then make something else.
Well, according to Macquarie, AI slop is low quality content created by generative AI, which often contains errors.
As we've said before on Newstime, there are good things about artificial intelligence, but it doesn't always serve up accurate information.
So we need to put on our thinking caps and ask if what we're seeing on the internet is the real deal.
There are other words of the year too.
Dictionary.com announced theirs as, oh dear, 6-7.
6-7.
6-7 just means anything that you could say if you say it in that way.
6-7.
Like a dude that said that song and then that kid said 6-7 at a basketball play.
The problem with 6-7 is that nobody really knows what it means.
Even the writers of the dictionary said that.
They said it first appeared in a rap song, but it's since gone viral in schools and on social media this year.
It really is a nonsense word, or words.
Whatever it is, it's found itself in a dictionary.
Because most people like it.
It should be in the dictionary, because if supercalifragilisticexpialidocious means the same thing as 6-7.
Six, seven has to be.
I wonder which new words will become popular in 2020, six or seven.
See what I did there?
Six, seven.
Story number three.
There are so many computer and smartphone games out there.
I play Roblox, but now I don't.
I play other games.
Minecraft, Among Us, random Harry Potter game, Fortnite and Wordle.
I love playing kids!
In Western Australia, some traditional owners realised that, yes, young people love playing games.
Because, um, kids don't like going off the phone.
The elders were concerned that the Nibali kids weren't speaking their traditional language anymore.
This language was once spoken right across the Pilbara region, but now only eight people can speak it fluently.
That means the language is classified as near extinct.
So the traditional owners decided to create a smartphone game called Nibaliwiri.
It's bright and colourful, like other popular games, and it features 90 traditional words.
Fortnite and Minecraft are really fun.
The game would probably be fun.
So they can learn different languages.
So they can share their language with other people.
Simon Tebrink is one of the game's creators and he says in the game players get to be junior rangers in a culturally significant wetland.
Players have to collect cultural objects as they navigate their way through each of the different locations.
And as they collect those objects, they will hear sounds and words actually spoken in New Bali.
So again, it's reinforcing the language.
This game recently won four silver awards and one bronze at the Global Anthem Awards, which recognises projects that are making a social impact.
That's cool.
Traditional owners are also planning to create a digital language centre and work with local councils to make sure the language is being used on street signs and places that tourists go to visit.
Thanks to all of this hard work, there are hopes that the language of Nibali people will continue for generations to come.
Let's go on a journey now through the dense rainforests of indonesia, where a conservationist named deaky has spent 13 years searching for something incredibly rare dinosaurs, a humpback whale from one billion years ago stuck in the water.
The vikings.
Deaky was actually searching for a flower.
It's one called the rafflesia hasselti.
It's the rarest type of stinking corpse lily in the world.
There's probably like only like seven in the world.
This flower is so rare that it hasn't been seen in the wild by a human for ten whole years.
A local ranger sent Diki a photo of what they suspected was the flower in its early stages of growth.
Deaky saw and knew that he only had a short amount of time to get to the flower to see it bloom.
Because it rarely opens.
That's right.
Deaky spent 23 hours trekking through the jungle to find it.
In dangerous spots too, where Sumatran tigers and rhinos live.
And yes!
He found it.
It looks like meat and in the middle it looks like a hole that wants to eat your head off.
It looks like a bit of salami into like a flower shape.
It like looks like meat and a flower at the same time.
When it's closed it doesn't really look like meat.
There's no doubt that this is one unique flower.
It's bright red and big and it can grow up to a metre wide.
How do you think Deaky felt when he finally saw it?
Lucky.
Happy because he found it.
Deaky said he hunched over and cried with happiness.
And then, an hour later, under the moonlight, the flower bloomed.
Diki called it a magical experience.
Now he's asking Indonesia to support a more sustainable ecosystem, so Sumatran rainforests with flowers, just like this one, can be protected.
OK friends, time to emerge from the jungle now, because it's time for our.
This story made me go wild because I love space and I know a lot about it.
Tell me, if people move to space one day, maybe to live on the moon or Mars, what sorts of things might they need?
So, um, they will need, um, A giant rocket ship.
A helmet and a space suit so your body doesn't break into a million pieces.
Pizza.
A pizzeria on the moon?
I guess people do say it's made of cheese.
You're right, though.
People are going to need food if they live on the moon, and that's why some researchers have recently sent some moss spores into space.
The moss was sent to the International Space Station and placed outside for nine months.
Because it just sticks to stuff.
Moss is known as one of the toughest plants on Earth.
It manages to survive in places like Antarctica.
While humans need a spacesuit to be outside in space, scientists wondered about moss.
Would it be tough enough to survive?
Well, if it just floats away and then just goes near the sun, which is very hot, when it gets so close, like melt.
Well, fear not, because the moss stayed put.
And after nine months in low orbit conditions, it was sent back to Earth.
After doing some tests on the moss, it was found that most of the spores were still able to reproduce.
This shows that some seeds and spores can put up with harsh space conditions and low light.
And this knowledge can help scientists think about creating food crops that might be able to survive in deep space, which would mean reliable food for astronauts who are on long missions.
It would be good because then you could live on the moon.
It's exciting stuff, but there's still a lot of work to be done, especially if you want to grow yourself some tasty pizza toppings.
And with that, my friends, we have eaten ourselves all the way to the crust of another delicious news time.
Thanks, Ruby.
You are so welcome.
Let's do it all again next week, shall we?
Bye, Ruby.
Bye.
See you later.
Or as they say in Cantonese, 再见.
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