Watching Australia

Something that annoys Australians is that because they are at the other end of the World, nobody
takes much notice of them.
They blame the timezone difference because when they are up and about and throwing boomerangs and being chased by deadly spiders or whatever they do down there, we have all gone to bed and when we wake up its ignored for Northern Hemisphere business.
Of course this blog is an advocate of an all inclusive world where everybody has an equal voice so i
occasionally look down under to see what the Aussies have been up to and this week there was an exciting science story.
Australian scientists at the Parkes telescope have been picking up strange radio signals and for the past 17 years they have been scanning the heavens in search for aliens who may be transmitting the signals at Earth to announce their presence.
Finally, after almost two decades of the best Australian brains being baffled as their searches proved fruitless, a student discovered that the source of the signals was the microwave in the kitchen.
Emily Petroff noticed that the signals were only received during business hours and then when the microwave was in use and concluded that: 'It turns out that you can generate these particular local signals by opening the door of the microwave to stop the microwave, and that produces these weird bursts that we're seeing at Parkes. It was kind of a surprise to all of us' she added.
Of course we could point out that it took 17 years for a boffin to recognise that the rays only came when someone was warming a lasagna in the kitchen but to ridicule Australian science would be to ridicule the many other contributions that Australians have given to us such as .....erm ..... hmmm ..... that is ..... erm .... yawn, wow i'm tired, time for bed i reckon.