Muddy Bottoms - Bruce Atkins

Congratulations to Tim Thorpe for 20 years at RRR and his latest birthday.

Bron and Anth are in the studio, lamenting the injuries and illness of themselves and others. All woth it for 2 kegs and $160,000 for the Sacred Heart Mission.

Watch out for a certain show on Ten and its relationship with the police !!

Look out for the front page of the Age

Why muddy bottoms in South Gippsland - A new publication is designed to help people identify what they see as they wander around the bottoms of Victoria. They have a bit of a PR problem as they look boring, but they are incredibly important and diverse. It covers mollucses, worms, plants and fish. It is just a sampler, and you need to see a muddy bottom for yourself.

It will be circulated to all the coast care coordinators, who will then take it out to Parks Vic sites through the state. Give Bruce a call at work on (03) 51839116

Harry is off to the US to find out how they do marine education in other parts of the world. One of the key issues is money, where we are dependent on Government money and volunteers, where as the US has philanthropy as a major part of its culture, along with companies paying into these centres in lieu of fines !!

Harry will be back from New York soon, and we hope he will come back on the show with an update. Look out for the blog

Mythbusters is a science-meets-popular-culture series that seeks to investigate the bizarre claims of urban legends and misconceptions about all manner of things, by putting them to the test using the rigours of modern science.

They try and reproduce myths, and if they can't - they then try and make it happen - no matter what extreme they have to go to !!

And they do marine myths !

Can a shark can detect a drop of blood in an olympic size pool
Escape from alcatraz
Does punching sharks drive them away
Will shooting a scuba tank in a shark make it explode (a'la Jaws)
Bullet proof water
Seasick cures
Will you get sucked down by the boat, and
The Ping Pong Ball Salvage - Can you use ping pong balls to raise a sunken ship?

First, Adam does a few tests to see if this myth is even feasible. He finds out that fifteen ping pong balls will lift one pound of weight.Even so, they calculate that they will need 60,000 ping pong balls to raise their boat. Next, Jamie comes up with a quick and easy way to get the ping pong balls into the boat, using water and gravity. Then they sink a small boat. They start pumping ping pong balls into it, and after a few minor tweaks, everything is running well. After only about half of the 60,000 balls are pumped into it, it starts to rise, and then heads straight for the surface! The boys and Christine rule this one plausible, but totally impractical!

But - read the Popular Science article in April 1965
A freighter carrying 5,000 sheep capsized at the docks in Kuwait harbor in the Persian Gulf and threatened to contaminate a water-purification plant, an idea from a Walt Disney Donald Duck cartoon helped to raise it. Karl Kroeyer, a Danish engineer called in, remembered the cartoon in a Copenhagen newspaper.

Kroeyer used polystyrene foam instead. It took 150 tons of foam and three months to raise the ship and tow it away.

"Sandfly Point"

"Love only hurts "

"By list and fury"

Blanche Dubois

Sprout