australia

Finally a Pokémon GO! pop song, thanks to Australian art rock band The Stiffys.

Just in case you are planning a trip Down UNder - Margot Robbie defines 50 Australian slang terms for you (not?) to use

Australia's prime minister,Malcolm Turnbull, just came up with a new campaign premise that 'Veep' fans will be a little too familiar with. He talks about keeping continuity... but also changing, something that Julia Louise-Dreyfus's character on 'Veep' also promised. 

You can see him explain it right here:



Actors and creators involved on the show, 'Veep', commented on how surprised they were that this turned into a real political talking point.  Maybe they were too good at parodying politics? 


via @simonblackwell, @frankrichny, @OfficialJLD

This is, of course, a reference to Ryan Reynold's poorly received first try at Deadpool in 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'.

AKA, the Merc Without the Mouth

Adelaide local, Steven Wilshire is a gosh darn Australian hero. This dude set up a personal sprinkler system for a lil koala that quite frankly, undeniably, was having a tough go of it with the heat. Bro move.

Crikey!

Bindi Irwin, daughter of late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, has won season 21 of Dancing With The Stars.

The 17-year-old Australian had consistently wowed judges this season with her top-notch performances and tearful tributes to her father.

Bindi beat finalist Nick Carter to take the trophy.

"Honestly, Bindi deserved it," the former Backstreet Boy insisted after the ceremony. "Bindi deserved it! She kicked butt."

And just look at this lift! It's clear that the best contestant won.

Well, that win was short-lived.

A woman identified only as "Chantelle" by an Australian radio station made one very costly mistake after winning $825 on a 100-to-1 horse race bet.

She took a selfie with her ticket and posted it to Facebook. DOH!

To her dismay, someone saw the barcode of the winning ticket in her photo and used it to claim her winnings.

"To the low life who is obviously my friend on Facebook and used my photo to claim our winnings. You're a massive d*ck. You ruined my day," she wrote on Facebook.

She told the radio station that police were able to track where the money was claimed, so she might get some sweet redemption.

But you kind of have to give it to the person who claimed the cash.

That was genius.

Have you ever wondered why Australians don't finish the ends of their words and generally sound like they're super chill?

It's because their ancestors were super chill. And super drunk.

Dean Frenkel, a communications expert at Victoria University in Melbourne, claims that early Australian settlers from Britain were big fans of alcohol. So much so, that they developed a slurred accent that lives on today.

"Our forefathers regularly got drunk together and through their frequent interactions unknowingly added an alcoholic slur to our national speech patterns," he wrote in The Age.

"For the past two centuries, from generation to generation, drunken Aussie-speak continues to be taught by sober parents to their children."

He says the average Australian only speaks at two-thirds capacity and with improper articulation.

What does the queen have to say about this lazy approach to language?

Emma may have Down syndrome, autism and a cleft palette, but this video proves that hasn't kept her from starting a business as a paper shredder for businesses.

Her mother, Jo, was so determined to help her daughter find independence that the two of them brain stormed ideas on what work she could do that make everyone happy. Emma loved shredding paper and the rest is almost history.

Receiving employment was only the first step in branching out to shredding paper for multiple businesses. And with a name like Master Shredder, which does indeed come from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' archenemy, how can she lose?

Well done, Master Shredder!

There's nothing like an new haircut to put a pep in your step.

But this Australian sheep is probably feeling a little better than with the average haircut. And that's because he is also 90 pounds lighter.

A Canberra sheep named Chris was recently captured by animal welfare workers after getting lost from his herd for more than two years. It seems that during this time he really let himself go.

Chris' fleece was sheered off Thursday by four-time national shearing champion Ian Elkins, and it weighed in at around 90 pounds, easily topping the previous record.

Fleece this large can cause serious health problems, said RSPCA ACT chief executive Tammy Ven Dange.

"It can actually make it impossible for them to go to the bathroom. We don't know how bad the damage could be because this has been building for awhile," she said.

Chris is reportedly in good health, and will likely join a local herd to live out the rest of his (lighter) days.

And here's reason number 195708 to never trust anything on the Internet.

A woman by the name of Natalie Amyot fooled a lot of people this week by uploading a video claiming that she was looking for the father of her unborn child. As it turns out, this was all a horrible viral marketing stunt.

The story goes that Amyot met a man on vacation in Australia's Sunny Coast, fell in love with him and lost contact when she went back to France.

Now, six weeks later she is back in Australia looking for her lost love/baby daddy.

She even set up a Facebook account for people to reach out with information about the mystery man.

But a new video posted Tuesday revealed the entire story to be a hoax. A man joins her on screen and spills the beans.

"This has been a viral video for Holiday Mooloolaba. My name is Andy Sellar and I own a company called Sunny Coast social media," he says to the camera.

So, there you have it. Everything is marketing. And the Internet is a horrible place.

Australian professor and artist Stelarc wants the world to hear him. He just has an unorthodox plan to get there.

The head of the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory at Curtin University is in the process of growing a human ear under his left arm, from a bio-polymer scaffold implanted there.

ABC plots the route of this project from conception to implant.

Stelarc first conceived the idea in 1996, but it took another decade to find the medical team willing to make it a reality.

They were recruited from around the world to insert a scaffold underneath his skin.

Within six months, tissue and blood vessels had developed around the structure.

"The ear is pretty much now a part of my arm, it's fixed to my arm and it has its own blood supply," he said.

The next step is to make the ear more three-dimensional — lifting it up off the arm and growing an ear lobe from Stelarc's stem cells.

After that, Stelarc wants to implant a microphone, recording all that happens around him as if it were a functioning ear. He wants anyone to have access to the live audio via Internet.

"There won't be an on-off switch," Stelarc told ABC. "If I'm not in a wi-fi hotspot or I switch off my home modem, then perhaps I'll be offline, but the idea actually is to try to keep the ear online all the time."

Art, y'all.

Some Australian officials have begun clamoring for a limited ban on the national condiment Vegemite.

If you've ever tried the stuff, especially if you have an American palette, you may want the yeasty brown spread to be banned on its taste merits. But those officials have a different desire to get rid of the stuff, according to the BBC

Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion described the salty spread as a "precursor to misery".

He said it was being bought in bulk to make moonshine.

Brewer's yeast is a key ingredient in the spread and is used in the production of beer and ale.

In communities where alcohol is banned because of addiction problems, Mr Scullion said Vegemite sales should also be restricted.

It's not something that Prime Minister Tony Abbott is espousing, but it has many champions in the right-leaning government of Australia.

See, but, the thing is: it's not possible to make alcohol out of vegemite.

As they detail in this Gizmodo article, you can't remove the brewer's yeast from the Vegemite.

that the yeast in Vegemite is deactivated as it's processed. As my wife said yesterday when we were talking about the story, trying to extract brewer's yeast from Vegemite would be like trying to extract an egg from a cake.

So, if you want to get the weird condiment banned, you're going to have to use its taste as the platform.

Maratus personatus. Remember that name. For that is the name of the cutest spider science has yet to find, maybe probably will ever find.

This tiny, striped, huge-eyed spider may just change the way we thing about the eight-legged crawlers. Just about everything from its appearance to its mating habits gives you more and more reasons to love it and love Jürgen Otto, the man who took the pictures.



Hi!

Newscientist.com gives you all the information you need to jump on this bandwagon.

Officially named Maratus personatus (the species name derives from the Latin for masked), blueface belongs to the growing family of peacock spiders – dazzling little Australian natives that are just 3 to 5 millimetres long. As the name suggests, the males use vivid colours to attract females. But unlike other peacock spiders, the male M. personatus does not have a fan-like abdomen that it extends while trying to court females. Instead, it relies on its blue mask and the characteristic white banding around it to lure lady spiders.

It's mating ritual involves scurrying back and forth with two of its legs in the air, hoping to attract attention from females its bright blue Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mask.



Do you want a video? What a silly question.

A 23-year-old woman in Sydney, Australia has won over the world after standing up to a hateful train passenger who was accusing a Muslim woman of being part of ISIS.

Stacey Eden overheard the passenger harassing her for about 10 minutes before deciding to intervene and film their conversation.

At one point the lady mocks the Muslim woman for wearing a hijab.

“Why do you wear it for a man that marries a six year-old girl?” she asks.

“She wears it for herself, ok?” Eden replies. “She wears it because she wants to be modest with her body.”

The Islamaphobic woman then brings up recent terror attacks and beheadings, to which Eden says “that’s not her doing it. That’s a minority of people.”

She posted the video of the confrontation to her Facebook page on Wednesday encouraging everyone to love on another regardless of religion.

“People like this make me sick,” she wrote in a Facebook post with the video. “People who are so ignorant and disrespectful to other people who were clearly sitting there minding their own business. ”

She’s received lots of support from people online about the incident, including the Muslim woman’s husband Hafeez Ahmed Bhatti who posted the video to his own page thanking her.

“God bless Stacey Eden,” he wrote.

Kieran Murray, an Australian guy traveling the world, noticed how hard it was for people to say one simple Australian greeting.

So he had a bunch of people give it a shot on camera.

Can you say “G’Day mate! How you going?”

Because these people sure can’t.