Elephants get cool audio system

0:03 Caloroga Shock Media. Hey there, Johnny Mack with five good news stories. Hey, what should we do with all these cigarette butts that everyone's thrown out? What if we turn them into bricks? Yeah? Over six trillion cigarette butts are discarded every year. And because they're made of plastic, nicotine tar heavy metals, they don't just sit there looking ugly. They leach toxins into soil and water over time. Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia I've been working on a way to deal with it, and what they've come up with is they're making bricks. The process involves adding roughly one percent cigarette butt material into clay mixtures used to make standard bricks. That small addition means that the bricks require less energy to produce in the kiln, and the finished bricks are lighter and provide better insulation than regular bricks. That means lower heating and cooling costs for whoever lives or works in the building with cigarette butt bricks. In Atlanta Zoo Atlanta has four African elephants. They are Kelly, Mascholo, Tara, and Titan. They're well cared for, however, they need mental challenges. The zoo already had a concrete enrichment wall with holes so that elephants can reach through with their trunk searching for food or play objects. However, Ariana, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, had another idea. She designed an audio enrichment system to add a new dimension to the wall. Here's how it works.

1:28 Cameras using computer vision detect when an elephant's trunk enters one of the holes in the wall. That triggers a nearby speaker to play a low frequency tone. The sound isn't too loud for humans, but elephants can hear them quite differently. Kirby Miller is the senior elephant caretaker at Zoe Atlanta, and Kirby said, with our elephants they can hear much higher frequencies than we can. The noise isn't that loud for us, but for them, they're feeling that noise and they can hear much more, which makes it more stimulating for them now. Before they added the sound part, the elephants only approached the wall when they knew food was behind it. After the audio system went in, Kirby says, be off somewhere else. And would hear the speaker playing the sounds. We knew there wasn't any food back there. Tara had her trunk in one of the holes, just listening to the sound. They let us know they like it. They're very curious about it. Congratulations to ninety eight year old Harry, world War Two veteran. Recently he stood on top of a flying airplane for more than nine minutes at over one thousand feet, He became the world's oldest wing walker. He spent eleven months working with a physical trainer to prepare his body and mind for the attempt.

2:29 At ninety eight and eleven months, he climbed on top of a biplane. He set up dreamed of doing this since I was a young child, and I finally lived that dream at ninety eight years old. And to be a Guinness World Record title older is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. This was also a fundraiser for the Lenox Children's Cancer Fund that was a personal tribute. He lost both his wife and son to battles with cancer. Lindsey is a representative from the fund. Lindsay said Harry is proof that it's never too late to chase a dream. At ninety eight years old. Would his achieved is nothing short of extraordinary. I've had the privilege of getting know him and seeing the determination behind this challenge. Meanwhile, congratulations to Saniel. He's fifty seven and set a different kind of record. This one largest collection of paper cups, eight hundred and fifty eight of them from thirty one different countries.

3:16 I feel like he could break that record if you try to or wanted to. He's got other records. This first came in twenty fourteen for his collection of phone cards that started in nineteen ninety seven when he was looking through his brother's wallet. Over the next fifteen years, the collection grew to over twelve thousand phone cards representing two hundred and forty five different countries. Somebody else broke that record, and he said, rather than retaking that title, I've shifted my focus towards new challenges, including paper cups. And what's he working on next? He wants to set the record for largest collection of wedding invitations. Current record a woman in Greece has six hundred all right. Catherine lives in Florida. She's used to seeing deer and bobcats and coyotes in her backyard. But recently she was like, huh, what's that. Is it a large cat? No, she tot a local Newstane. At first I thought it was a large cat, and then I processed it and I was like, oh my goodness, that's a monkey. She started recording video.

4:06 Was a Reese's monkey. She reported it, so the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Their response was, yeah, we know, don't approach it, don't feed it. We made a note of it. Apparently, this part of Florida is about seventy miles from Silver Springs, where a wild population of the Reese's monkeys has been living since nineteen thirty eight. You see, a tour boat operator brought them to an island that's now part of Silver Springs State Park, thinking it would be a good attraction. It was one problem. Reese's monkeys are strong swimmers. They swam off the island. They've been living wild in Florida ever since for eighty eight years. Who knew. So if you see a monkey and you call the authorities, they're gonna be like, yeah, we know. Those are five good news stories for today. Have a great day.