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ABC Listen. Hello there, my friends.
It's Ruby here and you are listening to News Time.
Hey, Ruby. G'day, Ruby.
If you've listened to News Time before, you'll know that we end every week's countdown with the WoW of the Week.
Today's episode, it's all WoW.
It's WoW First 2024, a countdown of five amazing stories that made us go, wow.
Here we go. Story number five.
In January, we met a mini chess champion taking the world by storm.
This story made me go, wow, because it makes me realise that kids can be just as amazing as adults.
Chess is a board game that requires a lot of concentration.
You get some pieces on a board, including a queen and castles and pawns, and you move them around to try to protect your king.
That's a really complicated game.
The night can go like an L shape.
Ooh, I played a lot with man.
I love chess and my dad teaches me and it's really, really fun to play, but my dad always feeds me.
Chess is played by people all over the world.
Some people spend years studying the game, developing their skills and strategies.
Bodhana Sivanandan is eight years old and lives in London in England.
She's been playing chess since she was five and she absolutely loves it.
Recently, Bodhana competed in a chess competition called the European Rapid and Blitz Championship in Zagreb in Croatia.
More than 500 players, most of them grown -ups, competed in this special kind of chess where players only have a limited time to make each move.
Bodhana came 73rd. She was the top -ranking female player in the whole competition.
That's amazing, incredible.
Famous chess players from around the world have sent their congratulations to Bodhana for her amazing achievement.
And they think that if she keeps working hard, she could grow up to be one of the greatest chess players of all time.
Well, they're correct because she beat like 50 people I think it was.
They say her style of chess is very mature and that she thinks ahead and plans her moves better than most adults do.
She must have felt so excited and proud of herself.
She did indeed. Good work, Bodhana.
In April, we went for a run with a superhuman athlete.
This story made me go wow because it taught me always stay positive.
Jasmine Parris is 40 years old.
She lives in Scotland and works as a vet.
When she's not helping sick animals, she spends her spare time running very long distances.
Like a 2540K run? Yeah, sometimes 40 kilometres, but sometimes much further.
Recently, Jasmine competed in something called the Barkley Marathons.
That's an ultra marathon where people run about 160 kilometres.
That's further than the distance between Sydney and Newcastle.
The ultra marathon is like a big race, which is longer than the marathon.
The race is run over five loops of a very difficult track up in the mountains.
Where competitors don't just have to run, they have to navigate the course themselves.
It's tough stuff, and it's definitely not for everyone.
More than 1 ,000 people have tried to finish the Barkley marathons, but only 20 people in the whole world have ever done it.
Just recently, Jasmine became the first ever woman to do it.
Wow, that's cool and amazing as she would be very tired.
She would be exhausted.
As she approached the finish line on her final lap, Jasmine felt her body wanting to give up and slow down.
But she said to herself that if she didn't beat the timer this time, she'd have to do the whole thing again.
And that thought was the motivation she needed to get her legs pumping all the way to the finish line.
That's very, very cool.
I think that's quite impressive.
Proud of herself. Jasmine hopes that her achievement will inspire girls and women around the world to chase their dreams and believe in themselves.
Yeah! Story number three.
In July, it was time...
..to just chill out.
This story made me go, wow, because I know a tradition from another country now.
There are lots of competitions out there about finding out who's the fastest or the strongest at something, but the Space Out competition in South Korea looks for a very different kind of champion.
Competitors there sit on yoga mats and stare into space.
The rules after that are simple.
Do absolutely nothing.
Don't move. Don't talk.
Don't sing. Don't dance.
Do nothing. Ha -ha -ha!
Silly. The winner is the person who is the most relaxed at the end of the time.
The judges figure that out by measuring how fast their heart is beating.
The person with the slowest heartbeat?
They win. The competition was started 10 years ago by an artist named Woops Young.
They liked the idea of lots of people sitting absolutely still in the middle of a busy city like Seoul in South Korea.
People rushing around the city from their jobs or schools would see these still people, and maybe they'd take a moment to think about slowing down themselves.
Well, it's sort of good because you need to relax your body, but some people could get bored.
The winner this year was Valentina Vilches, a Chilean psychology student who lives in South Korea.
She said she came to have fun, and she also wanted to share her experience with her patients, the people that she helps through stressful times.
A South Korean man named Kim Ki -kyung said that sometimes doing nothing, it's essential.
He says it seems like some people have forgotten how to just be.
What do you reckon?
Do you think you'd be good at a do -nothing competition?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I think we could win that in the holidays.
Story number two. In September, we found out what you get when you combine a robot with a mushroom.
This story made me go wild because I thought of something that I didn't even know.
Imagine a robot wheeling and whirring all around the place.
Who do you imagine might be controlling it?
My controllers, scientists?
By getting programmed by really anyone, as long as they know how to program it correct.
Well, scientists at Cornell University in America have built a robot that isn't controlled by a remote or an app.
This robot is controlled by a mushroom.
Whoa! You know how mushrooms move to see the sun and stuff?
The robot could be moving the exact same way the mushroom is.
You're spot on. Scientists have hooked up this robot to a king oyster mushroom, which is something you might find in a stir -fry.
And they've let the mushroom's root -like threads, called mycelium, grow into the hardware.
As the mushroom reacts to light, it sends electrical signals down through the mycelium into the robot.
These little robots don't do much more than jump and roll about the laboratory at the moment, but it is a big breakthrough for the team.
It's something called a bio -hybrid robot.
That's a combination of a machine and a living thing.
What if the mushroom, like, breaks, will the robot go over control?
What if lightning just hit the mushroom?
Good questions. There's still a lot of work to be done, but the team at Cornell University is hoping that maybe one day they'll be able to use robots similar to this one to help take care of the environment.
Maybe a mushroom robot of the future will be able to sense whether there's too much air pollution or something wrong with the soil.
And then the robot could drive the plant away to somewhere better.
I smell a future off.
We'll have to keep an eye on this project.
These little robots definitely have some shroom for improvement.
Story number one. And finally, in November, we ventured deep into a lost city.
The story made me go well because I didn't know there was a whole ancient civilisation underground.
Imagine you're surfing the internet and all of a sudden you discover the secrets of a lost city.
That is exactly what happened to archaeology student Luke Ald Thomas.
Archaeologists are people who study ancient civilisations.
The people who lived on Earth thousands of years ago.
Luke found some scans that were taken from underneath a Mexican jungle.
They'd been sitting there for a while and no -one had taken much notice.
But Luke is an archaeologist, so he knew the signs of something worth investigating.
I think that they found, like, old vases and stuff.
It might be full of lost creatures and some weird animals.
It turns out Luke had discovered an ancient Mayan city.
It had pyramids and sports fields and roads and theatres, all buried under hundreds of years worth of plant growth.
And the temple looks really cool and I wonder if it's, like, Minecraft.
It looks very ancient.
I imagine there would be, I don't know, like 50 stairs.
The Mayans lived in an area that we now call Mexico.
They're famous for their art, their buildings, their mathematics and their calendar.
And they're one of the first groups of people who came up with a complicated system for writing and reading.
They had a lot of sacrifices, by the way.
Luke was shocked by his discovery.
And archaeologists from around the world, they were pretty surprised, too.
The area has been named Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.
It might have even been one of the biggest cities for Mayan people.
Luke says his discovery and all the research that's happened since shows that there are probably heaps more ancient civilisations hidden from view, just waiting to be found.
And that is it for Wow Fest.
So, did I do it? Did I manage to make you say, Oh, wow.
I hope so. I'll catch you next week.
See you later.
