THE LOCATION
Bounded by Brisbane Water National Park on NSW s Central Coast is the secluded village of Pearl Beach. As the crow flies, Sydney is so close you can see it. Pristine beaches, swathes of national park and seaside villages - including nearby Woy Woy, Ettalong, Patonga and Killcare - await.
It s a one hour and 25-minute drive north of Sydney on the M1 (veer off when you see oversized dinosaur Ploddy atop a bushy outcrop - home of the Australian Reptile Park). Alternatively take the 30-minute ferry ride from Palm Beach to the neighbouring village of Patonga. Taxis (Uber is virtually non-existent) and a bus service operate, however you ll need a car for exploring.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have turned spider webs into music - creating an eerie soundtrack that could help them better understand how the arachnids spin their complex creations and even how they communicate.
The MIT team worked with Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno to take two-dimensional laser scans of a spider web, which were stitched together and converted into a mathematical model that could recreate the web in 3D in virtual reality. They also worked with MIT s music department to create the harp-like virtual instrument. Even though the web looks really random, there actually are a lot of internal structures and you can visualise them and you can look at them, but it s really hard to grasp for the human imagination or human brain to understand all these structural details, said MIT engineering professor Markus Buehler, who presented the work on Monday at a virtual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Image: Vladimir Matić-Kuriljov
An image of a “baby platypus” has gone viral due to the fact it’s extremely adorable. The reality is, though we’d love it to be real, it’s definitely
not a baby platypus.
The original tweet by 660rd, which has since been deleted, received more than 180,000 likes and just shy of 24,000 retweets but if you didn’t read the replies, you might mistake it for the real deal.
why the fuck does a baby platypus look like that pic.twitter.com/VrDudem0kJ
Though it’s been deleted, a number of copycat tweets have re-uploaded it, spreading the adorable lie. This is why we can’t have nice things on the internet.
Skaie Hull is a News and Sports Reporter.
She has a strong passion for local news and believes regional communities need a voice.
Skaie grew up on the Central Coast and in Newcastle.
Prior to joining the NBN team in 2016, Skaie worked as a journalist for Seven News, Queensland and was also PR & Media Advisor for YMCA NSW and TAFE NSW.
She attended the University of the Sunshine Coast.
‘One health’ approach critical to tackle health inequality and emerging diseases
Moritz Thibaud/ABACA via Reuters / 06 Apr 2021
Aside from the myriad new challenges it introduced, the wide and rapid spread of COVID-19 also revealed long-standing global health inequalities. And while the pandemic may be the most widely publicized example, it is hardly the only case in which those who are already vulnerable bear the brunt of the impact.
Recently, snake bite was re-declared as a neglected tropical disease. According to the World Health Organization, about 5.4 million snake bites occur each year – even though most of their harmful consequences could be prevented by making safe and effective antivenoms more widely available and accessible.