NEW research has highlighted the health and social benefits of spending time semi-immersed in a hot spring. Family and friends tend to enjoy the shared experience, while the shedding of mobile phones and time spent in singular contemplation have emerged as being among the main attractions to hot springs. The latest research findings (first published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research) are based on 4265 responses to survey of bathers at Peninsula Hot Springs, in Springs Lane, Fingal, near Rye. As well as highlighting beneficial social outcomes, the study also found bathing at the hot springs provided significant…
Author: Keith Platt
WITHOUT an urgent injection of funds the Western Port Biosphere could collapse within two months. Dire financial circumstances being faced by the biosphere were outlined last week at an extraordinary general meeting which gave the board of directors the power to wind up the “company” if money is not found by the end of this month, February. With only four of the five “partner” municipalities contributing towards its annual income the biosphere has been forced to use its cash reserves to make up the shortfall. Executive officer Cecelia Witton told the Tuesday 31 January meeting that the biosphere looked like…
NEVER one to miss an opportunity to make fun (and make a point) of those he sees as benefitting from the public purse, Seaford artist Tony Sowersby has chosen Foreign Minister Julie Bishop as the subject of his entry in this year’s Bald Archy Prize. Billed as “the art that laughs at art’s lighter side” the Bald Archy Prize “provides artists of all styles and standards with a genuine opportunity, ranging from the hilarious to the bizarrely vulgar, to create portrait paintings of humour, dark satire, light comedy or caricature”. Sowersby, who regularly wryly comments on public affairs through his…
WHILE politicians and environmentalists are on a collision course over plans to build a coal gasification plant at Hastings, Kawasaki Heavy Industries is already building a test vessel to carry liquefied hydrogen. The ship now being developed by the Japanese company is designed to carry 2500 cubic metres of the gas which will be produced with brown coal from the Latrobe Valley. Because of hydrogen’s high evaporation rate the ship will have a double shell to provide vacuum insulation. Kawasaki says it will have the Liquefied hydrogen transportation pioneering test vessel ready by 2020, the same year the state government…
A PILOT project to produce hydrogen from brown coal will require the gas to be liquefied near Hastings before being shipped to Japan. Kawasaki Heavy Industries says it will release more details of the project “in the first quarter of 2017 for consideration and consultation”. The company says it has been “exploring the opportunity” to create a hydrogen energy supply chain from Australia to Japan for more than six. During that time discussions had been held with state and federal governments, industry and research organisations. “The initiative is well known,” general manager of Kawasaki’s hydrogen development centre, Dr Eiichi Harada,…