ABC Listen. Hello friends, it's Ruby here and you're listening to Newstime.
Hi Ruby. Hello Ruby.
This week on Newstime, you're going to be hearing about a puzzling new dinosaur discovery.
We'll hit the road in a vehicle powered by veggies and we'll meet some cheeky animals in a bit of a sticky situation in our Wow of the Week.
What do you think? Should we get into it?
Let's do it! Story number five.
It's been a busy time on the roads of Australia lately.
Lots of you have been packing up the car and heading off on school holidays.
That's meant lots of people stopping at service stations and filling up their cars with fuel or charging them up with electricity.
electricity but one man in South Australia powers his car a little bit differently he fills it up with vegetable oil maybe the um gas station was out of petrol so he bought vegetable oil instead usually a car doesn't really function with vegetable oil it has to use like petrol and And car oil, not food oil.
Yes, that's right. Ordinarily, if you were to put vegetable oil in a car, well, it'd stop working.
But Ian MacLeod is 95 years old and has spent many, many years looking for ways to live more sustainably.
He bought a ute that had a pre -combustion diesel engine and then converted it so it could be powered by vegetable oil instead.
I think it's like weird, but I think he's really smart to be able to do that because normally cars run on electricity and diesel and stuff.
Because he cares about the environment and he wants to make something new than just electric and petrol.
It's out of this world.
Nobody's ever, ever put a cart on vegetable oil.
It is pretty out there, but it's also very clever.
Ian visits the restaurants round his town and collects the vegetable oil they've used.
All of that would usually be thrown away and become waste.
But Ian takes the oil home, cleans it and pours it into his U -Butte Veggie Powered Ute.
And that's not all.
Ian has also managed to power his whole house with vegetable oil.
As you can imagine, that saves a few dollars on bills.
It makes me wonder, how else could we be powering our lives more sustainably?
So I would just buy a car that gets power from the sun. If you're an environmentalist and don't like to waste your compost, you can just mush up the compost, take out all the juice and put it in your car.
Um, I'd buy a normal car that runs on petrol, but instead of petrol, I'd buy, like, 300 kilograms of butter, melt one kilogram of butter, and pour it in my car.
I like these ideas, but you better not try that last one at home.
Story number four. Along the New South Wales coastline, there have been some very large creatures making a splash.
Yep, it's whale migration season.
It was at Djerringong and it was two whales and they were from the back so they just looked like whales but they were actually whales.
I saw, like, two. I was like, whoa.
Every winter, tens of thousands of humpback whales make their annual trip from Antarctica all the way up the east coast, searching for warmer water.
It's a special time for people who live along the coastline.
They can pull out their binoculars and watch these majestic creatures swimming north.
In year one, I once went to this beach in Sydney and we saw some whales and they were on the wave, so they were pretty close.
I tried to go whale watching, but all I saw was some fishes, not a single whale.
Well, here's your chance to have another look Look, every year, scientists from the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans, with the very clever acronym ORCA, invite people like you to look out to sea and tell them how many whales you can see.
To see how many whales are still alive in the wild?
Exactly. All that information can be used to help understand how many whales are migrating each year and how healthy they are.
Because like whale watchers, it's their passion.
Couldn't they like miss a lot of whales?
Like there could be whales like staying under.
Whales can hold their breath for a while but they pop up their heads eventually.
So far this year there have been a record of 5 ,000 whale sightings and that includes some calves that are only a few weeks old.
The best time to see whales is when the ocean is calm and steady.
So if you find yourself near the coast, keep your eyes peeled and have a whale of a time.
When you think of a dinosaur, you probably think of a big scary creature like a T -Rex or a big shuffling Triceratops.
But a much smaller dinosaur has gone on display in a museum recently.
In fact, it was nicknamed for its habit of darting around the feet of the giants like the Stegosaurus.
Couldn't the chickens be the same size as the dinosaurs?
Because, like, the dinosaurs evolved into chickens.
They did, but this dinosaur is a bit bigger than a chicken.
It's about the size of a dog and it's got much bigger feet and a longer tail.
Its proper name is Enigma Cursa.
Enigma -sa -saur Enigma -sa -saur Enigma cursor You've got it!
Enigma cursor means puzzling runner and this dinosaur has been puzzling scientists for quite some time I don't know why it's a puzzling runner, it's only got two feet This dinosaur has been quite a riddle When the skeleton was first found it was classified as a nanosaurus, or small lizard but that was actually a mistake.
Closer study of the skeleton found that the leg bones were quite different.
It was actually a whole new species.
That looks like a mini giraffe.
I think they would be really happy that they found a new species but I think they would be really annoyed that they thought it was another species, the species that we already had.
These scientists were pretty excited to have a complete skeleton of such a small dinosaur.
After all, smaller bones can be harder to find.
I definitely don't want to see an enigma zoar because we don't know much about it yet and it might be very dangerous.
Don't worry, you can relax about that.
Although it's a newly discovered species, this pooch -sized puzzler is well and truly extinct.
Story number two. If you've ever watched a game of rugby union, you would know that things can get loud.
The crowd makes lots of noise cheering on their team and a whistle like this from the ref tells players when they need to stop down and players call out to each other as they pass the ball.
Well, imagine for a moment you were playing and you couldn't hear any of that.
It means you can't hear the whole entire game.
it would be hard to hear the referee when they're saying stuff so it would be really hard that's right the sport of deaf rugby union has been played in Australia for 25 years to make sure that deaf and hard of hearing players have the opportunity to play rugby every player has some form of hearing loss and the sport is played with lots of hand signals so players can communicate with each other and understand the referee Maybe you could use hand signals to the other players and tell them, like, I'm free and stuff.
They could use blinking with their eyes, mouse code or hand signals.
Recently, the very first Deaf Rugby Union Pacific Rim Championship was held in Queensland.
More than 100 players from Australia, Japan, Fiji and Samoa faced off against each other over a few days And Fiji won the men's and women's competitions.
They felt good about themselves because they've come so far.
It's such an achievement to represent their country.
They feel good meeting new people who are deaf from other countries and stuff.
The sport of deaf rugby keeps on growing.
The Australian team is gearing up for a World Cup, which is being held in Japan in 2026.
Good luck. Go team.
and now my friends we're passing the ball to the last story of the countdown it's time for wow of the week this story made me go wow because why would the bears want to escape when they just get honey from the zookeepers this story made me go wow because of the bears did they smell the honey?
Did they, like, get a key and magically open it?
Over in Britain, at a wildlife park, live two European brown bears named Mish and Lucy.
These young bears are usually pretty happy in their enclosure but one day they decided to be a bit cheeky and take a bearcation.
The bear pair escaped their enclosure.
Luckily, they didn't cause any harm and all the visitors to the park were safely moved inside a building.
But the bears didn't quite keep out of trouble.
They made a beeline for a storage room and tucked into a whole lot of honey.
Why do they put honey in the storage room?
They might be in love with honey.
Honey, honey. Maybe they were like, Like, hmm, well, we're smarter than the peeps.
We're going to go steal some of the peeps' honey.
Run, run, run. Steal, steal, steal.
Eat! These bears weren't loose for long.
The team of keepers at the wildlife park carefully encouraged these bears to head back into their enclosure and before long they were both sound asleep with very full bellies.
Maybe they were like, hmm, well now we're full of honey Let's hibernate early.
I guess you could say this pear couldn't bear staying awake after all that honey.
And that, my friends, brings us to the end of another sweet sweet countdown.
I'm going to make like a bee and buzz off.
Thank you, Ruby. Thank you.
You are very welcome.
See you later, Ruby.
Bye, Ruby. See you later.
Or, as they say in Britain, home of two very full bears cheerio news time is an abc kids listen podcast for other awesome podcasts to play music to move to and stories and soundtracks for sleep download the abc kids listen app it's free from your app store door.
