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And this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Saturday, the thirtieth of November. I'm Zara, I'm Sam Sam. It's been a long week, and what better way to end the week than to talk about some of the brightness that exists in the world. And I want to start somewhere very personal for you.
This is a story I couldn't be more excited by. I have asthma. I carry my paffa with me everywhere.
It has been a weird one because it was really bad when I was a little kid, and then it kind of got better when I was an adolescent, and now it's gotten a bit.
Tricky again, fully grown adult.
Yeah, and so there's nothing cooler than having a puffer
in my pocket. But there's big news this week which actually could be one of the biggest developments in asthma medicine in over fifty years, and that is from the results of a trial that was experimenting different ways to give people steroids, so medicine after that experienced a severe asthma attack, and so currently the way that you're given steroids after a severe asthma attack is over a long course of tablets and each tablet has a tiny part
of the recommended dose of the steroid in it. You take it for a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple of months and recover. What the study was trying to figure out is is there a difference if you give the person experiencing the attack all the steroid dosage in
one vaccine as they're almost experiencing the attack. And what the study found, and the study was published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine Journal, it found that it actually has a major difference in the speed of the recovery and how quickly you can bounce back to full fitness after an attack when you get that vaccine.
So scientific discovery could make it a lot quicker and faster for people who are experiencing asthma attacks to come out the other side of it exactly.
And it can also be administered from home potentially, So it really could change the way that we think about asthma treatment. Asthma is a condition that affects about three hundred and forty million people all around the world, and this, as I said, is the first major development in the treatment of asthma in over fifty years.
I mean, it's pretty incredible and also kind of shocking that there hasn't been a major development in fifty years, given how widespread and how common it is. But you know, that's I guess what happened.
Doctors always say it's a really easy one to try and manage. It's a hard one to try and get on top of, and so maybe this could make a difference.
Love it.
Well, we're going to stick on the theme of medicine, and that's because this week Lifeblood confirmed that almost five eighteen year olds have become blood donors in Australia over the past year. See the youth are okay, I know they are more than okay. It actually means that this group's so this group of eighteen year olds are the largest new donor group by age in the country, which I just think is so wonderful.
It's an incredible achievement from a group that would have just finished their HSC or VC.
You know, yeah, that a school is they're rolling up their sleeves and Lifeblood said that together the eighteen year olds have made more than ten six hundred donations, which we know would go so far in helping the lives of other Australians and they said in a media release young adults are essential to Lifeblood's mission to gain an additional one hundred thousand new donors in the next year to meet increased patient demand.
And it's not much of the population that actually donates blood right.
No, it's around three percent of the eligible population who currently donates. So Lifeblood are really pushing for more donors, and especially more donors from the next generation so that they can roll up their sleeves and they can get involved.
I remember a bit of work we did with Lifeblood trying to help educate people on why it's so important to donate blood, and they said one of the key reasons people don't is for the snacks and that people love the chalky milk.
And was thinking it was just altruism, but actually it was about the snacks.
Sometimes a muslibar can fix everything. Nazara, I want to bring you a story from the cinema, and the movie is changing pace a bit.
Here yeah, it is. It is slightly different.
The movie in cinema business hasn't really had much good news over the past couple of years.
Called Barbie good news.
That was good news, but you know, the rise of streaming services a pandemic. The movie landscape has changed, and I'm sure a lot of people listening could probably think of a local or independent cinema at least that might have show up shop in the last five years. But in good news for cinemas, the release of Moana TiO is bucking the trend and it's predicted to bring in one hundred and seventy five million US dollars, So that's about two hundred and sixty nine million Aussie dollars in
ticket sales in the US alone over this weekend. And it's the Thanksgiving weekend, which is a big weekend for the release of movies. But this could be the most successful one ever. It's going to overtake Frozen two, which Charlie holds the record. One other bit of good news I wanted to highlight when I was reading about Moana Io is it's one of the first films to feature
film composers that rose to fame via TikTok fascinating. The composers are Abigail Barlow twenty three and Emily Bear twenty six. Their kind of duo name is Barlow and Bear and oh I've seen that.
Yeah.
They rose to fame on TikTok because they made an unofficial.
Musical for Bridgeton.
Yeah. Yeah.
They won the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album for the release of this unofficial musical. They had a little issue where they kind of got sued by Netflix and then they sorted it out. Now they're composing for Disney. They're also working on a musical for Broadway, and I guess there's no saying how far they'll go.
I see what you did there, though I have not seen Moana too. But two people where we went around the office and said our highs and loads of the week, said that seeing it was their high. So I don't know if you need much more of an endorsement than that. But moving on, what is the news from sea life?
This is a nice one to talk about from the conservation world. So you know, a macaroni penguin, so think about happy feet, a macaroni in happy Feet, the penguins with the bitty yellow. So the average lifespan of a Macaroni penguin in the wild is eight to fifteen years. If they're in zoo or a conservation environment, it's about thirty years. And that's why the fortieth birthday celebration this week of the celebrity of SeaWorld San Diego, a Macaroni penguin called best Friend.
Is such a remarkable, bizarre name for anything. I don't mind it. I think it's a cool name. Best Friend the Macaroni penguin exactly. So.
Best Friend was born in nineteen eighty four.
Yeah, for sure.
He's currently SeaWorld's oldest penguin, and he's thought to be one of the oldest penguins in the entire continent of North America. Macaroni penguin populations in the wild have stagnated over the last couple of years, namely because of climate change and human activity, and they are the most abundant penguin species. So the ability to study best Friend as he gets older is really really special for the staff at San Diego Zoo. Have a listened to how they
reacted on his birthday. I think you'll sense the excitement.
He is the.
Sweetest sort man in the floor world you can't see very well, but of.
Course due to that ball.
Friend, we love you so much.
Every single we have used it.
And now is there a one more story? And it's something that's close to your heart. Not quite the same as asthma, but tell us something about something you.
Love a lot.
I love air friers. It's look, I'm not a chef by any stretch of the imagination. I actually very rarely cook, but when I do cook, it's always with an air fryer. And that's why I was so pleased to read. I don't know if this is like a backhanded good news, but that's okay, I'll go with it. I was really excited to read that air friers have been confirmed as the least polluting cooking method.
You've always been one for the planet.
Just doing it for the people. So according to new research that was published by the University of Birmingham, air fryers produce a tiny fraction of the indoor air pollution emitted by other cooking methods, so things like pan and deep frying, and I'd argue get a better outcome because your meal is just slightly charred and excellently crunchy.
Is this a direct call out to Brevel or.
Whoever you make Hello, please send me one and I'll just keep talking about how great they are. So the researchers, in doing this experiment, cooked chicken breast using five different methods pan frying, sturf frying, deep fat frying, boiling, and air frying. And they did it in this controlled kitchen setting. And then they measured the level of two different things, something called particulate matter and volatile organic compounds. Don't know
what either of those two things are. What I do know, though, is that by both of these metrics, the pollution was the lowest for air frying.
I feel like I could have told you the result of that purely based on how much oil would have splash everywhere for those five methods.
Yes, you don't use oil, Well, I don't use oil when I air fry.
That would be a competitive advantage, Zara, thank you so much for that. Yeah, that was a really cool, good news episode. We covered something both close to our hearts. For me it was a debilitating respiratory condition and for you it was a way to cook the single meal you cook a month. That's all we got time for on today's edition. Of the Daily os a special good News edition for you. We're going to be back again on Monday morning with our explainer. Until then, have a wonderful weekend.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calcotin woman from Gadigoo Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gatighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
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