Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
a listener production. Hi, Natasha Belling with you and welcome to the afternoon edition of The Briefing. Coming up in our deep dive, they're popping up all across the country. So what are data centres? Who owns them? What do they do? And should we be concerned? All those details in just a moment. But first, let's check the afternoon headlines this Tuesday, the 12th of May.
Defence Minister Richard Miles has confirmed parachuting within the Australian Defence Force has been paused as investigations continue into the death of an SAS soldier. 50-year-old Lachlan Muddle, who was a highly skilled and experienced parachute jumper, died after an incident during a training exercise at Jervis Bay Airfield in New South Wales.
Here is Major General Garth Gould from the Special Operations Command.
After successfully opening their parachutes, what we know of the incident suggests that both paratroopers collided several hundred feet above the ground whilst they were maneuvering towards the drop zone. After the collision, both soldiers fell from height. One soldier, a sergeant from the Australian Defence Force Parachute School, survived the fall with minor injuries. The second soldier,
Warrant Officer Lachlan Muddle received fatal injuries as a result of the fall.
The Defence Minister says it's not clear at this stage if it was a medical episode or terrible accident but says there will be a thorough investigation. Another person from the MV Hondias cruise ship has tested positive to Hantavirus. The person is not an Australian and they are now reportedly in a critical condition in hospital in France.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler says that the new case shows that the risk of Hantavirus spreading is not zero.
This is, albeit a relatively low risk, still a risk of transmission among passengers of this cruise ship.
Minister Butler also gave an update on the six people who will be travelling back to Australia. He says they have arrived in the Netherlands and that the Australian government is in the process of chartering a flight to bring them back home this week and then they will isolate at a quarantine facility.
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Chapter 2: What tragic event involving a soldier is discussed?
Tonight's budget will be our most responsible and it will be our most ambitious budget. It will be a really responsible budget focused on resilience and reform. There are five major packages in tonight's budget. A fuel security package. A package focused on the cost of living and housing. A productivity package. a tax reform package and also a savings package as well.
The budget is set to be one of the most significant for Australia in decades, with the cost of living crunch, the war in the Middle East and ongoing concerns over the housing crisis and spiralling inflation. And we'll have special coverage of the federal budget and the key takeaways both in the morning and afternoon editions of The Briefing tomorrow.
Calls are growing for British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to resign after a number of disastrous local council elections over the weekend. Nigel Farage's Reform Party has scored a number of significant wins over the PM's ruling Labor Party. So far, the BBC has tallied more than 70 Labor members of Parliament who have called on Starmer to resign.
The members are blaming a fall in Starmer's personal popularity for the losses at the ballot box. There's been a major update in the global hacking of education platform Canvas, which saw 175 million records stolen from around 9,000 institutions around the world. Hackers have reportedly agreed to delete the data after reaching an agreement with the company behind Canvas.
The company says in a statement, quote, while there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control. Several Australian universities have already delayed assignments because of the Canvas hack. And Wordle is becoming a TV game show.
Wordle went viral in 2021 during the COVID pandemic when a software developer made the game for his partner. The New York Times then acquired the game for more than US$1 million and more than 1,700 Wordle puzzles have now been published. The latest move of making Wordle into a game show was announced on US Morning TV by Jimmy Fallon.
This is very exciting. I have a big announcement to make. We've been developing Wordle as a game show for the past two and a half years with the New York Times. And it's official. We are making Wordle game show with our host, Savannah Guthrie.
And as you heard, the game show will be hosted by NBC's Savannah Guthrie, who was with Fallon during the announcement. Now it's time to get into our deep dive with tech expert Dr Bronwyn Cumbo from UTS on data centres. Australia is now in the top countries in the world for investors to build data centres. But there are many questions that need to be answered. Bronwyn, what are data centres?
Data centres are usually referred to as the engines of the internet. So they're the things that store all of our digital data and process all of our digital data. So when you do a Google query, it travels down a fibre optic cable, it lands in a data centre where it sits in a server rack, this data, and it gets processed and then travels back to to your device.
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Chapter 3: What are the latest updates on Hantavirus infections?
They're state-significant developments, so they're managed by the state government, mainly because of their huge energy consumption. So the capacity of a data centre is measured in energy in megawatts or gigawatts. We've recently had a one gigawatt
um plan to develop out in western sydney so the equivalent energy that these things use they do require a lot of energy to do all their processing but also the cooling and the amount of water they require as well is also related to cooling so if you think about a computer and how it warms up throughout the day as it's doing the work a data center is essentially a large computer full of these server racks so you can imagine the amount of heat that these things are generating
Unfortunately, servers can't function when they get too hot. So cooling is really important for data center efficiency. They usually need to stay around 18 to 23, 24 degrees. There are some engineers who are trying to look at ways to design server racks that can function at higher temperatures. But essentially, we need the energy to keep the ā there's two reasons for the energy in water.
First is we have air coolers. So they're essentially air conditioners that run through and keep the air flowing. But they also have water as a cooling process. So water is 3,000 times more efficient at removing heat. and depending on the design, they use a lot of water, depending on the design of the data centre.
So when you have evaporative cooling as your main mechanism, they're essentially using water, and it's mostly potable water at the moment, that runs through the system and then evaporates out of the data centre and essentially takes that heat out with it. Some companies use what's called a closed-loop cooling system.
That's where they have a fixed amount of water, and so they're much more water efficient. You'll see that in their data. sustainability reporting. But those companies also tend to use a lot more energy because they need to cool that water down to run it through the system again. So they're relying on the energy to cool that system.
And what they do there is often offset the energy with renewable energy through things like power purchasing agreements. So they're investing in renewable energy resources and then the challenge of building that renewable infrastructure becomes somebody else's problem.
Bronwyn, in regards to the data centres being built, we know they're being built at a much greater scale than what they were over previous years because of the onset of technology and also AI. For local communities, especially if these data centres are built in residential areas, are there safety or health concerns with these facilities?
This is an issue that's coming out at the moment in the parliamentary inquiry that's being run by the New South Wales government. So data centres are zoned industrial. So when you have industrial zones, things like light industrial or business enterprises, a bunch of different types of works that you can build in an industrial zone and data centres fall across a number of them.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the upcoming federal budget?
So I think the planning assessment process does need some interrogation, which the government's doing at the moment. They're looking at how it can improve. It's just that the government processes are thorough and slow and the industry is far more nimble and also looking to maximise their efficiency. benefits, their economic benefits, and get their foot in the door with Australia.
So a lot of what we're talking about is largely speculative. There are a lot of development applications that have been put into the planning portal. Some of them have been approved. Some of them are currently being assessed. And there's a lot of community resistance. So it's an interesting time to kind of see how the government's going to respond.
with the industry pressure, the federal government pressure, but also the pushback from communities on the ground.
There's certainly important conversations we need to have. We really appreciate your time, Bronwyn. Thanks so much.
No worries, Tash. Thank you.
That was tech expert Dr Bronwyn Cumbo from the University of Technology in Sydney. And that's it for this episode of the afternoon edition of The Briefing. We'd love you to subscribe or follow us on Instagram at The Briefing Podcast. I'm Natasha Belling. Thanks for your company.
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