🌞 When elephant friends unite

After a (very) late night in the office thanks to the election, I haven’t got anything particularly innovative for this introduction.

Instead, I’ll leave it simple: Have a fabulous Sunday!

Last week, I brought you the story of three teenagers building an electricity-free fridge, and this week, I’m bringing you the story of two teenage girls trying to make food more accessible, sustainable and impactful.

Hailey and Yume, two 16-year-old girls from the Philippines, have developed a new app that connects farmers directly to consumers. According to the teens, the idea is that by removing the middlemen, they’re “helping farmers earn fairer prices and offering consumers produce that’s 72% cheaper”.

It’s also targeting a key issue in the Philippines: 30% of agricultural produce is wasted due to supply chain inefficiencies.

“Through our journey, we also met, connected with, and learned from incredible Filipinos, who prompted us to think innovatively and multidimensionally,” said Hailey and Yume.

The teens have been recognised for their innovation as winners of the 2025 Earth Prize for the Oceania and Southeast Asia region. They hope the app will help create a “direct, fair, sustainable” future.

A cat is spared the loud noises at Pet Expo Thailand with specially designed ear muffs.

Enough said.

The world’s largest solar telescope has taken its first images! For context, solar telescopes are built to observe the sun and study its surface. The Hawaii-based Inouye Solar Telescope is the largest in the world and has been preparing to take its first images for a *chilled* 15 years!

The Visible Tunable Filtergraph (VTF), aka a space camera, was originally built in Germany to be able to take detailed images.

It essentially lets the camera look at one colour at a time so scientists can study what things in space are made of and how they’re changing. The VTF has analysed the sunlight captured by the telescope in more detail than ever before. This means that we will have in-depth photographic detail of the smallest stars.

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Two Taronga Zoo elephants Pak Boon and Tang Mo have arrived safely at the Monarto Safari Park in South Australia, after a 1300km drive that took over 22 hours.

The two girls are currently resting in their barn and adjusting to the new sights, sounds and smells of the Mallee Plains, just near the Victorian border. They already have two friends waiting for them: Burma from Auckland and Permai from Perth.

In January, Monarto Safari Park Director Peter Clark said, “Bringing elephants to South Australia has been a jumbo journey and one that we’ve seen spark such an outpouring of love and support from the community.”

“As an endangered species with numbers declining in the wild, we hope this support continues and ignites a passion for conserving this special species.”

Monarto Safari Park aims to create a herd of elephants to conserve the species. 

A new study is the tool you’ve been looking for to encourage the children in your life to put down the iPad, and pick up a book.

Researchers found that reading books led to greater activation in the right side of the brain, particularly in areas attributed to the development of social understanding and relationship-building. This differed during screen time, when brain responses were even across the sides of the brain, suggesting that there was no greater development in the brain’s function.

The researchers ultimately suggested that screens do not engage children as socially as books do, and reading books (or having books read to them, which produced identical brain activity) can do wonders for a child’s social development.

It wasn’t all bad news for screen timers - researchers found that screen time alongside a live social partner (a parent or childcare worker, for example) went some way in activating that right-side area.

Off the back of last week’s shoutout to Belle’s mum (and in the lead up to Mother’s Day next week) I wanted to highlight Elliot’s wonderful mum, Viviana.

Every week, Elliot sends screenshots of his mum cheering on his work at TDA and telling all her friends to read our news. Last week, we were quietly stoked to meet her when she visited Sydney, and I was too obsessed with this photo not to include it!