June 27, 2026

Elephants get cool audio system

Show Notes
Transcript

Johnny Mac shares five good news stories: RMIT researchers in Australia are adding about 1% cigarette butt material to clay to make bricks that need less kiln energy, are lighter, and insulate better, helping address the over six trillion plastic, toxin-leaching cigarette butts discarded yearly. At Zoo Atlanta, a Georgia Tech PhD student designed an audio enrichment system for elephants—computer vision detects trunks entering a wall’s holes and triggers low-frequency tones that the elephants find stimulating even without food. A 98-year-old WWII veteran became the world’s oldest wing walker, standing atop a biplane for over nine minutes at 1,000+ feet after 11 months of training, fundraising for the Lenox Children’s Cancer Fund. Sunil, 57, set a record with 858 paper cups from 31 countries and is pursuing wedding invitation collecting. In Florida, a backyard rhesus monkey sighting is linked to a wild population living near Silver Springs since 1938.

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Caloroga Shock Media. Hey there, Johnny Mack with five good

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news stories. Hey, what should we do with all these

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cigarette butts that everyone's thrown out? What if we turn

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them into bricks? Yeah? Over six trillion cigarette butts are

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discarded every year. And because they're made of plastic, nicotine

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tar heavy metals, they don't just sit there looking ugly.

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They leach toxins into soil and water over time. Researchers

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at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia I've

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been working on a way to deal with it, and

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what they've come up with is they're making bricks. The

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process involves adding roughly one percent cigarette butt material into

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clay mixtures used to make standard bricks. That small addition

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means that the bricks require less energy to produce in

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the kiln, and the finished bricks are lighter and provide

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better insulation than regular bricks. That means lower heating and

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cooling costs for whoever lives or works in the building

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with cigarette butt bricks. In Atlanta Zoo Atlanta has four

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African elephants. They are Kelly, Mascholo, Tara, and Titan. They're

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well cared for, however, they need mental challenges. The zoo

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already had a concrete enrichment wall with holes so that

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elephants can reach through with their trunk searching for food

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or play objects. However, Ariana, a PhD student at Georgia Tech,

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had another idea. She designed an audio enrichment system to

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add a new dimension to the wall. Here's how it works.

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Cameras using computer vision detect when an elephant's trunk enters

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one of the holes in the wall. That triggers a

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nearby speaker to play a low frequency tone. The sound

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isn't too loud for humans, but elephants can hear them

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quite differently. Kirby Miller is the senior elephant caretaker at

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Zoe Atlanta, and Kirby said, with our elephants they can

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hear much higher frequencies than we can. The noise isn't

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that loud for us, but for them, they're feeling that

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noise and they can hear much more, which makes it

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more stimulating for them now. Before they added the sound part,

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the elephants only approached the wall when they knew food

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was behind it. After the audio system went in, Kirby says,

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be off somewhere else. And would hear the speaker playing

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the sounds. We knew there wasn't any food back there.

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Tara had her trunk in one of the holes, just

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listening to the sound. They let us know they like it.

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They're very curious about it. Congratulations to ninety eight year

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old Harry, world War Two veteran. Recently he stood on

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top of a flying airplane for more than nine minutes

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at over one thousand feet, He became the world's oldest

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wing walker. He spent eleven months working with a physical

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trainer to prepare his body and mind for the attempt.

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At ninety eight and eleven months, he climbed on top

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of a biplane. He set up dreamed of doing this

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since I was a young child, and I finally lived

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that dream at ninety eight years old. And to be

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a Guinness World Record title older is beyond anything I

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could have ever imagined. This was also a fundraiser for

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the Lenox Children's Cancer Fund that was a personal tribute.

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He lost both his wife and son to battles with cancer.

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Lindsey is a representative from the fund. Lindsay said Harry

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is proof that it's never too late to chase a dream.

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At ninety eight years old. Would his achieved is nothing

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short of extraordinary. I've had the privilege of getting know

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him and seeing the determination behind this challenge. Meanwhile, congratulations

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to Saniel. He's fifty seven and set a different kind

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of record. This one largest collection of paper cups, eight

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hundred and fifty eight of them from thirty one different countries.

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I feel like he could break that record if you

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try to or wanted to. He's got other records. This

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first came in twenty fourteen for his collection of phone

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cards that started in nineteen ninety seven when he was

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looking through his brother's wallet. Over the next fifteen years,

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the collection grew to over twelve thousand phone cards representing

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two hundred and forty five different countries. Somebody else broke

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that record, and he said, rather than retaking that title,

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I've shifted my focus towards new challenges, including paper cups.

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And what's he working on next? He wants to set

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the record for largest collection of wedding invitations. Current record

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a woman in Greece has six hundred all right. Catherine

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lives in Florida. She's used to seeing deer and bobcats

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and coyotes in her backyard. But recently she was like, huh,

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what's that. Is it a large cat? No, she tot

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a local Newstane. At first I thought it was a

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large cat, and then I processed it and I was like,

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oh my goodness, that's a monkey. She started recording video.

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Was a Reese's monkey. She reported it, so the Florida

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Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Their response was, yeah, we know,

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don't approach it, don't feed it. We made a note

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of it. Apparently, this part of Florida is about seventy

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miles from Silver Springs, where a wild population of the

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Reese's monkeys has been living since nineteen thirty eight. You see,

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a tour boat operator brought them to an island that's

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now part of Silver Springs State Park, thinking it would

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be a good attraction. It was one problem. Reese's monkeys

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are strong swimmers. They swam off the island. They've been

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living wild in Florida ever since for eighty eight years.

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Who knew. So if you see a monkey and you

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call the authorities, they're gonna be like, yeah, we know.

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Those are five good news stories for today. Have a

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great day.