ABC Listen. Hello my friends, it's Ruby here and you're listening to Newstime.
Hey Ruby. Hello. On Newstime today, we are celebrating a special event on the calendar called Lunar New Year.
We're also going to meet someone who stomps on bricks.
and you'll discover why people are lining up for hours to smell something terrible.
What do you reckon?
Are you ready to learn more?
Let's do it. Story number five.
Right now, there's a new moon in the sky, the first new moon of 2025.
That means it's Lunar New Year.
Lunar New Year is celebrated by more than a billion people around the world, including in countries like China, Malaysia, the Philippines and here in Australia too.
People clean their cars and houses to sweep away bad luck.
We eat loads of yummy food and Mummy and Daddy will take me to the lion dance and we can take pictures with them.
People celebrate with feasts and fireworks and they spend time with their friends and family.
They decorate with lanterns, usually in the lucky colours of red and gold.
Grown -ups also give younger people red envelopes called hongbao or lai si and they're filled with money.
There might be Lunar New Year celebrations happening somewhere near you.
like performances or markets.
There are a lot of events around us and I have been fortunate enough to be invited by a few.
In the Chinese zodiac, each year is given an animal symbol or a sign.
This year is the year of the snake.
Snakes represent good luck, wealth and wisdom.
This is the year of the snake.
I like snakes because the pattern on their back and sometimes on their tummy is really cool.
Happy Lunar New Year!
Happy Lunar New Year!
Happy Lunar New Year !新年快乐 !新年快乐!
Story number four. Sitting among the bushes and thickets of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney is a very special plant with a very special smell.
It is very tall and stinky and it has green leaves.
You're right. It's called a corpse flower, known as Banga Bangkai in Indonesian.
and its smell is so putrid, its nickname is putritia.
Some people have described this scent as somewhere between wet socks, hot cat food and rotting flesh.
Corpse flowers only bloom once every few years and the bloom only lasts for a day.
Then it shrivels up.
I would love to smell this flower because it's a one -in -a -lifetime, experience.
I would like to try to smell the stinky flower.
Well, you, my friend, are not alone.
Thousands of people line up for hours in Sydney for their chance to get a little whiff of putritia.
People want to smell this flower, I think, because they want to know how stinky it is.
Because it is really rare to smell one.
So why exactly does putritia smell so bad?
Corpse flowers are designed to attract pollinators that usually prefer to eat dead animals, like carrion beetles and flies.
The flower tricks the pollinators with its stinky smell, luring them over for a visit so they can carry the pollen away and hopefully grow more corpse flowers somewhere else.
There's a lot we can learn from corpse flowers.
I guess you could say they've got a stink that makes you think.
Story number three.
Basketball is one of the most popular sports in the world.
I know about basketball and it is a good exercise for you.
You have a ball and dribble it around and throw it to shoot goals.
Yep, it's a team sport that involves dribbling, throwing and shooting goals and an Australian basketballer has just made history.
Paddy Mills, a Gugura, Nagiagal and Dawiab Meriam man, is the first Australian to play 1 ,000 NBA games.
He probably practised a lot.
The NBA is a basketball competition in America.
You have to be really good to play for the NBA.
Some say it's the best basketball league in the world.
So, Patty playing 1 ,000 games is a massive achievement.
Patty tried his best and practised and practised many times.
Patty definitely works really hard.
Patty currently plays for the Utah Jazz team, But during his 15 -year career, he's played in some different teams too.
He also plays for the national Australian team, the Boomers.
In fact, in 2020, Paddy led the Boomers to a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics.
A thousand games is a massive physical accomplishment and it also takes an athlete a lot of determination and mental strength to keep playing at such an elite level.
Maybe when he was, like, at 800, he was like, I'm dedicated to do this.
I'm dedicated to get to that 1 ,000.
During his time as a basketballer, Patti Mills set up Indigenous Basketball Australia, which is a program for young Indigenous Australians to develop their basketball skills and their talent while also being proud of their culture and identity.
Congratulations, Patty.
Your achievements in leadership are certainly felt on and off the court.
Well done and good job.
Great work, Patty. Story number two.
Building with blocks, like Lego, it can be a lot of fun, but it's important to clean up properly afterwards.
any stray bricks left out might get stepped on and if you've ever been unlucky enough to stand on a piece of lego oh you know how painful it is.
I do step on the lego before it feels really painful it hurts your foot a lot and it leaves marks.
Dr Gabrielle Wall is from New Zealand and even knowing how painful it is to stand on one little brick of Lego, she decided to attempt the world record for running over 100 metres of Lego.
You'd need to have sheer courage to do that.
It must be a really hard record to break.
Gabrielle stood at the beginning of a running track covered with tens of thousands of little plastic blocks, ready to give this painful record a go.
And guess what? She managed to run 100 metres in just 24 .75 seconds, which is less than half a minute.
She thinks she's run faster than she ever did before because she wanted it over and done with as quickly as possible.
Gabrielle's plan was to run the race with her son, but the rules said runners had to be over 18.
so instead her son is planning to try and beat her record in a few years' time when he's old enough.
Of course, you should never step on a building block or a toy on purpose.
It's better to play and pack away.
Put them in a box so the Lego pieces don't fall out or get scattered around in your house.
Pack up toys after we play.
Good tips. I don't think I'd want to run on that many little toys, even if it did mean getting a world record.
Maybe there are some easier records to try.
Eating the most spaghetti.
I want to break the record of making the most colourful soap.
Maybe burping the alphabet?
And now it's time for...
Wow of the Week. This story made me go wow because no one has ever seen a meteor landing at the front yard, and it is really rare.
If you've ever looked up into the night sky and wished upon a shooting star, you might actually have been looking at a meteorite.
A meteorite is a piece of space rock that's fallen and landed on the surface of a moon or a planet like Earth.
While it's zooming through the sky, it's a meteor, and once it's on the ground, it's a meteorite.
Well, it's just a one -of -a -kind thing.
They're not quite one -of -a -kind, but it is rare to find one.
Most would -be meteorites burn up in the atmosphere long before they land on Earth, so you might see them shoot across the sky, but you probably won't find anything that's landed.
it. What's even rarer is hearing a meteorite hitting the ground.
I think they make like a deep sound.
That's a good guess.
And you know what my friends?
I can play the sound for you in a second thanks to some lucky Canadians.
In the country Canada, some people noticed suspicious dust outside their front door.
They had a camera near their doorbell so they were able to watch the video to see what had left this strange dust.
It turns out a meteorite had crash landed right outside their front door and they managed to record the whole thing.
So without further ado, this is the sound it would make if a meteorite landed on the footpath outside your place.
It was all silent until suddenly there was a crack in the front of the house.
It sounded like glass being thrown around.
That's why it's my wow of the week.
Scientists reckon this could be the first time ever the sound and video of a meteorite hitting the earth has been recorded.
I think the house owner feels really ultra surprised.
Yep. You won't see any meteorites near your place.
That's good to know.
The Canadian homeowners managed to collect a little bit of the dust and rock using a vacuum and a magnet.
That'd be a pretty cool decoration on a bookshelf.
And here we are, my friends, crash -landing at the end of this week's Countdown.
Did anyone get that on film?
Thanks, Ruby. Thank you.
No worries. I'll catch you all back here next week.
Bye, Ruby. Bye. See you later.
Or, as they say in Spanish, hasta luego.
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