Vegetable-powered vehicle and dinosaur discovery

Australia Broadcast Center

17-07-2025

It's been a busy time on the roads of Australia lately, with many of you packing up the car and heading away on school holidays. That's meant lots of people stopping at service stations filling up cars with fuel or charging them up with electricity.
But a man from South Australia powers his vehicle a little differently. He fills it up with vegetable oil! Ordinarily, if you were to put vegetable oil in your car it would stop working!
But, Ian McLeod is 95 years old and has spent 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.
Ian visits the restaurants around his town and collects vegetable oil that they've used, all of which would usually be thrown out as waste. He takes the oil home, cleans it, and pours it into his you-beaut veggie-powered ute!
That's not all though, he's also managed to power his whole house with vegetable oil, which saves a huge amount on bills.
It makes you wonder, how else could we be powering our lives more sustainably?
Along the New South Wales coastline, there's been some very large creatures making a splash. Yep, it's whale migration season!
Yes, every winter tens of thousands of humpback and minke whales make their annual trip from Antarctica all the way up the east coast, searching for warmer waters. It's a special time for those who live along the coastline to pull out binoculars and spy the majestic creatures swimming north.
Every year scientists from the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans – with the very clever acronym ORRCA – invite people like you to gaze out to sea and let them know how many whales you see.
All this information can be used to understand how many whales are migrating each year, and how healthy they are.
Whales can hold their breath for a while, but they'll pop their heads up eventually! So far this year there's been a record 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 large shuffling triceratops. But a much smaller dinosaur has been placed in a museum recently. In fact, it was even nicknamed for its habit of darting around the feet of giants like the Stegosaurus.
It's about the same size as a dog, but with much bigger feet and a longer tail. It's proper name is Enigmacursor.
This dinosaur has been quite a riddle for some time! When the skeleton was first found, it was classified as a nanosaurus – or 'small lizard'… but that was a mistake. Closer study of the skeleton found that the leg bones were quite different, and it was actually a whole new species.
The scientists were excited to have a complete skeleton of such a small dinosaur. After all, smaller bones are harder to find.
Although it's a newly-discovered species, this pooch-sized puzzler is well and truly extinct.
If you've been along to a game of rugby union, you'd know things can get loud. The crowd makes a lot of noise cheering on their team. A whistle 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.
The sport of deaf rugby union has been played in Australia for nearly 25 years, to make sure 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.
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, with Fiji winning both the men's and women's competitions.
The sport of deaf rugby keeps growing, with the Australian team gearing up for a World Cup being held in Japan in 2026.
Over in Britain, at a wildlife park, live two European brown bears named Mish and Lucy. The young bears are usually pretty happy in their enclosure, but one day they decided to be a little cheeky and take a bear-cation.
The bear pair escaped their enclosure but weren't grizzly at all. They didn't cause any harm, and all the visitors to the park were safely moved inside a building. But the bears didn't keep out of trouble. They made a beeline for a storage room, where they tucked in to a whole lot of honey.
The bears seemed to know where the tasty treats were kept, but they weren't loose for long. The team of keepers at the wildlife park carefully encouraged the bears to head back into their enclosure and before long they were both sound asleep with very full bellies.