5 days ago
BTN Newsbreak 09/07/2025
MOA BIRD
The US biotech company that says they brought back the 'Dire Wolf', now want to bring back another extinct animal. They're a flightless bird, they were pretty big, and roamed New Zealand about 500 years ago. It's a moa bird! And Colossal Biosciences reckons they can genetically engineer living birds to make them look like the South Island Giant moa. That basically means extracting ancient moa bird DNA and then using that DNA to edit the genes of it's closest living relatives, like the elegant crested tinamou or the emu. They've managed to do this before, editing wolf genes with dire wolf DNA, and using woolly mammoth DNA to make fuzzy mice. And one day, they hope to bring back extinct animals to help endangered species and ecosystems in the future. Yeah some experts reckon we shouldn't be messing with nature and re-introducing new species could actually be bad for the environment. So what do you think?
STATE OF ORIGIN
More than 80 thousand fans are at Sydney's Olympic Stadium tonight to watch the Blues and Maroons in the State of Origin decider. Plenty of people are tuning in from home too -millions in fact - as the series is one of the year's biggest events on Aussie TV. The Blues won the opener back in May, but the Maroons held on to clinch a narrow victory in the second hit out. For the decider, the Blues have the home-field advantage, and if they're the ones to lift the shield at the end of the night, it will be their second year running.
LINE-CALLINGIn tennis, we see plenty of these moments. That is until Wimbledon this year, because for the first time, line judges have been replaced by electronic line calling technology. And in some cases, it hasn't exactly been a smash hit. You see, the new system malfunctioned during the men's quarterfinal, tracking one of Taylor Fritz's shots in a rally, as if it was a serve. The AI tech also caused a stir earlier in the tournament, during Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova's game against Sonay Kartal, after it failed to make a clear out-call because it'd been "deactivated". Wimbledon organisers apologised for this error, but it's got a lot of people talking about tech's impact on the fairness and integrity of sport, and if it's still worth having people make these potentially game changing decisions. But others still reckon tech is the right call.
CANINE WATER PARK
First to Spain where these pups are giving this canine water park a whirl. It's called "Perros al Agua", which is Spanish for "Let's go for a swim, dogs", a sentence these guys seem to understand...I mean this pup even brought floaties. In Summer, about 800 dogs stop by every weekend.
APPLE-1 COMPUTER
Now to a special display in New York, showing off a very rare computer. And guess what, it still works! So you can in fact give it a whirl, if you're super rich that is. Experts say it's worth more than half a million dollars.
LEGO F1 CAR
And finally to this F1 car in England that, when given a whirl, can take you up to speeds of 20-kilometres per hour. Why so slow? Well, it's made out of Lego! 400,000 bricks to exact. It took a team of six expert model makers around 1,800 hours to make.
