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Kamala Harris left an audience baffled as she laughed and talked about Playboy magazine covers. The former vice president also launched into a confusing 'word salad' after being asked about the importance of humility. Her bizarre comments were made on Sunday during a question and answer session at the Australian Real Estate Conference, where she shared a 'funny' story about her mother. Harris sat on stage with real estate industry veteran John McGrath for over an hour and recalled that her mother was very focused on women's reproductive health, which included sharing her thoughts about 'fibroids' and 'hormones.' She said:...

There is no single answer to this puzzle. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for around 179 million years and during that time, evolved into an enormous array of different shapes and sizes. Some were tiny, like the diminutive Albinykus, which weighed under a kilogram (2.2lbs) and was probably less than 2ft (60cm) long. Others were among the biggest animals to have ever lived on land, such as the titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum, which may have weighed up to 72 tonnes. They ran on two legs, or plodded on four. And along with these diverse body shapes, they would have produced an equally...

Australian National Maritime Museum announced that a team of archaeological divers believe they have located the wreck of Koning Willem de Tweede. The 800-ton Dutch merchant sailing vessel was lost in Guichen Bay off South Australia in 1857. The team used marine magnetometry and underwater metal detectors in an area where the ship reportedly went down and were able to identify the ruins of a large ship measuring 460 feet long by 140 feet wide, which match the Dutch vessel's documented dimensions. Components from what appears to be the ship's windlass were also seen protruding from the seafloor and fragments...

An ancient clay tablet shows that the Babylonians used Pythagorean triples to measure accurate right angles for surveying land.Students may not believe that Pythagoras’ Theorem has real-world uses, but a 3,700-year-old tablet proves that their maths teachers are right. The artifact, named Si.427, shows how ancient land surveyors used geometry to draw boundaries accurately. Discovered in central Iraq in 1894, Si.427 sat in a museum in Istanbul for over a century. Now, mathematician Dr Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales, Australia, has studied the clay tablet and uncovered its meaning. “Si.427 dates from the Old Babylonian (OB)...

Si.427 is a hand tablet from 1900-1600 BC, created by an Old Babylonian surveyor. It’s made out of clay and the surveyor wrote on it with a stylus. Credit: Must credit UNSW Sydney ========================================================================================== A UNSW mathematician has revealed the origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet that has been hiding in plain sight in a museum in Istanbul for over a century. The tablet – known as Si.427 – was discovered in the late 19th century in what is now central Iraq, but its significance was unknown until the UNSW scientist’s detective work was revealed today. Most...

An illuminating exhibition of thirteen ancient Babylonian tablets, along with supplemental documentary material, opens at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) on November 12, 2010. Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics reveals the highly sophisticated mathematical practice and education that flourished in Babylonia -- present-day Iraq -- more than 1,000 years before the time of the Greek sages Thales and Pythagoras, with whom mathematics is traditionally said to have begun. The tablets in the exhibition, at once beautiful and enlightening, date from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1900-1700 BCE). They have been...

The best thing about being in Melbourne, Australia, is watching the free flowing glories of Australian Rules football in the state where the game was born. I love watching fast skillful free flowing football, especially the rapidly rising female Aussie Rules action. Its the best part of Australia for me.

mysterious Lord: the silent hidden God mercy and refuge lodge inside the shadows of His wings My friend, anglo-catholic Anglican bishop David Farrer, describes George Pell’s prison journals as “remarkably uplifting” and said he is grateful for the way they help us to pray. Above is a prayer which I have shaped today from words of the Cardinal about mass in the May 20, 2019 entry to the journal and from the words of Psalm 57 which he quotes in that entry. Lest We Forget: Cardinal George Pell, a truly great man of God, thrown to the lions by a...

Walls was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer in 2023Aussie rules legend Robert Walls has died aged 74 after using voluntary assisted dying laws. Walls won three premiership titles with Carlton Football Club as a player and a coach. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer, named acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, in 2023. The Age reports that Walls decided not to go through another round of chemotherapy after being told he had months to live earlier this year. “Having battled cancer for more than two years, Robert did it his way and...

The day I took this photo of Melbourne ruckwoman Georgia Campbell being tackled by key forward Tayla Harris, the configuration of elbows, heads and hands caught my eye as something special. Together, the two players looked like a Lotus Flower - the Buddhist symbol of purity, spiritual enlightenment and rebirth. I asked Tay if she'd like a song to be written about it and she said she'd prefer a rap. So I tried (without huge ability in the art form) to make one. (click here) In Melbourne, Aussie Rules football is often called a religion. Could the game become more...

Newly re-elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is now claiming that his government is a symbol for what he is calling "progressive patriotism". I will now compare some claims made for this way of thinking with the reality of Socialist Left governments. “Albanese begins second term with a new slogan.” Albanese and his party, the ALP, are much better at sloganising than they are at governing. "Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is pledging to strengthen Australia with a second-term agenda that eases division ......." Albanese won the recent election with a brilliantly effective but viciously unfair negative campaign against his conservative...

Dockamentry film maker, Jim Cousens, opens up on what it is like to be a man in modern Australia: Jim says: "Being faced with the reality of the feminism which has got its claws into just about all of us is a little bit like when you've got visitors over and there's a rat in the kitchen ........ ......... If you say, 'Oh God, there's a rat in the kitchen.', then you've actually drawn their attention to the problem. Maybe, if you'd just kept your mouth shut ,they would never have noticed. But if you keep your mouth shut and...

While the concept of men battling 16–foot prehistoric lizards sounds like something out of a 50’s sci-fi flick, a new discovery in Australia has revealed that such encounters may have occurred. According to a study appearing in Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers from the University of Queensland have found a tiny fossil that belonged to a giant lizard bone 50,000 years ago, indicating that gigantic reptiles and humans once co–existed.

Two miners made an unforgettable discovery in 1869: a gold nugget the size of a human. But the real surprise came when they tried to weigh it. The world’s largest ever gold nugget, discovered in 1869 during the Australian gold rush, remains a symbol of extraordinary wealth. Weighing as much as an adult man, the Welcome Stranger gold nugget, uncovered by two Cornish miners in Victoria, Australia, would be worth millions today. The “Welcome Stranger” Nugget On February 5, 1869, two miners, John Deason and Richard Oats, stumbled upon what would become the largest gold nugget ever found. “It is...

Yesterday, conservative Australian political commentator, Andrew Bolt discussed a proposal for British-style AI intelligence cameras in Melbourne. Mr Bolt asked his audience: “Do you want to be safer or do you want to be spied on?” and said that rising crime and terrorism is turning Australia into a “surveillance state, Chinese-style, you know where they even have a system of recognising you in the street and if they don’t like, if you’ve got a bad social credit, they can stop you doing things like catching a train.” The Lord Mayor told Bolt: “As Lord Mayor, I am very firmly committed...

A missing sausage dog that captivated the world after she disappeared on a South Australian island for a year-and-a-half has been reunited with her "euphoric" family. Valerie the dachshund escaped from a Kangaroo Island campground while on holiday with her owners, Georgia Gardner and Josh Fishlock, in November 2023. After an island-wide hunt, numerous reported sightings, and "round-the-clock" search and rescue efforts by Kangala Wildlife Rescue, she was found "fit and well" by the rescue last month. Ms Gardner and Mr Fishlock made the trip from their home in Albury, NSW, to Kangaroo Island yesterday where they were emotionally reunited...

Australia drives on the left side of the road, and the reason for this is straightforward: historical influence from Great Britain. As a British colony until 1901, Australia adopted many British customs and laws, including the practice of driving on the left. This was not a unique decision; many other former British colonies also inherited this system, but let’s dive deeper into the history and the how’s and why’s of this driving norm.

For people like me, the Australia I was born into, was a meritocracy where one wage could get a family a home. Times have changed. The forty hour week is gone for far too many people. But endeavour still inspires me. Youth brings me hope. As in my above poeticised image from a Maribyrnong Park Football Club match last Saturday. Today we need them to be lions. Reminds me of Shakespeare: “To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms...

ANKARA, March 6 (Reuters) - Turkey, with the second largest army in NATO after the United States, could contribute to a potential peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, a Turkish defence ministry source said on Wednesday. "The issue of contributing to a mission will be considered if deemed necessary for establishing regional stability and peace, and will be assessed mutually with all relevant parties," the source told reporters in Ankara.

The coalition campaign in this election has been shocking - incompetent, flatfooted, timid, incoherent and today we saw Liberals (in Australia the major conservative party is called the Liberal Party) ...... If the coalition draws the wrong lesson ..... it risks being destroyed ....... and already I do hear fake autopsies being written like this today by the Prime Minister: "The Liberal Party has become more and more right wing under Peter Dutton ,,,,," In fact Dutton isn't of the hard right or certainly hasn't shown it ....... he isn't even offering bigger tax cuts than Labor (the governing party)...