After Meghan appeared on MasterChef Australia this year, co-host Poh Ling Yeow says being reunited with the Duchess on the children’s version ‘will be a real treat’

The Duchess of Sussex is set to co-host Junior MasterChef Australia, the children’s version of the popular televised cooking competition, in 2027.

Meghan made her debut appearance on the adult version of MasterChef Australia in July this year, which was filmed during a four-day visit to Australia with Prince Harry in April. Network 10 said the Duchess’s appearance on the show drew its “largest Sunday audience since 2023”.

Athletes’ scramble to control – and monetise – their digital identities at the cutting edge of AI rights deals

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The Socceroos star stares at the camera as he strides through an enormous atrium, the sound of his football boots on polished concrete echoing around him. Suddenly, he spawns four digital clones that peel off out of view to re-emerge in different settings around the world.

This scene from a social media video is fake and generated by artificial intelligence. But it has been authorised by the very real 22-year-old footballer, Cristian Volpato, the latest professional athlete to licence and monetise his AI likeness.

A prodigiously wet monsoon season has brought damaging floods to parts of Australia, but transformed Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in a way not seen in decades

The Australian desert is green. Not just green – depending on where you look from above, it could also be a marbled reddy-pink and blue or yellow-brown with flecks of purple. But green is the most striking colour because the desert is not supposed to look like this.

It won’t last. But for now, in late September, the deep outback – a celebrated part of the Australian continent that few people get to see – is blanketed in plant life. There is sandhill wattle, saltbush and lignum, and grasses and desert flowers. The vegetation is thickest along hundreds of twisting rivers and creeks that cut across the landscape.

The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online. Clearing out digital clutter can minimise environmental impacts and boost productivity

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Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digital trails.

Our endless photo and video streams, bursting inboxes and unread subscriptions all feed the appetite for ever growing digital infrastructure. The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online – browsing the web or social media, streaming music or videos, or communicating – producing the equivalent of 229kg of carbon emissions, a study in Nature Communications found. And using AI tools and chatbots to generate text, images or video consumes “orders of magnitude” more energy than traditional computing methods.

Western Australian police say woman ‘experienced numbness to her tongue’ after tasting the curry at her workplace in Perth

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A woman has been charged after allegedly poisoning a co-worker’s lunch curry with snail pellets.

Western Australian police say a 58-year-old woman brought a container of curry to share with colleagues at her workplace in Perth’s southern suburbs in February.

Outsourcing the essential task of interviewing job applicants to a machine seems lazy at best, negligent at worst. I want better for all of us

Over the past 15 years of my working life, I’ve done a lot of interviews for a lot of different jobs and industries: call centre operator, social media manager, bookseller, copywriter, library worker. Recently, after completing my first year of a master’s degree in early childhood and primary teaching, I applied for a preschool education role and experienced a first: being interviewed by AI.

I’d heard of this practice and was aware of its shortcomings, from how demoralising it is to the risk of discrimination.

In Narromine – redubbed ‘Dollymine’ for the weekend – the country music star’s face is everywhere and a warm spirit of inclusivity is all-embracing

On a sporting oval in a rural Australian town 15,000km from Knoxville, Tennessee, dozens of Dolly Partons saunter down the runway as a boisterous crowd cheers and swats away flies with their cowboy hats.

As the sun begins to set, Jim Beams are flowing and music is blaring. One lucky punter is about to be crowned this year’s best-dressed Dolly, complete with sash, trophy and bragging rights.

The Narromine Line Dancers chat before performing for the crowd

Exclusive: Revelation comes after company’s executive told parliamentary inquiry he did not believe AI had been used to write message

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OpenAI used AI to help write the email to the Australian government advising that its AI agent had hacked into key departmental websites, Guardian Australia can reveal.

On Tuesday, one of the company’s executives told a parliamentary inquiry that he didn’t believe that its own technology had been used to create the email, but said the company needed to confirm this.

Company says it is reviewing 50 petabytes of data after its agents accessed websites including Medicare without authorisation

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OpenAI says its review in response to the Medicare and Hugging Face agent attacks is costing the company more than US$500,000 per day, as it deploys AI to examine data that would take a human 66m years to read.

The company has warned the review is ongoing, and more organisations may be informed they’ve been targeted in the near future.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been invited to appear before the Greens-led inquiry into AI and datacentres

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The chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic have been called to face a Senate inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents hacked Australian and US government websites.

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei were requested to appear at the Greens-led inquiry into AI and datacentres as their companies negotiate with the Labor government for greater access to Australian content in exchange for a greater local presence.

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The Socceroos have to settle for a draw as the five-time world champions score a last-gasp goal to cancel out Irankunda’s stunning free kick

Brazil might be looking to refresh their squad after their World Cup disappointment but there is still more than enough star power to light up any stage. Barcelona and Brazil forward Raphinha is one of the biggest stars of the lot, and will help lead the line against the Socceroos in Townsville. The No 9 spoke to Sid Lowe about embracing his new role as a leader of the team and the focal point of the attack.

What kind of leader [I am] depends on the moment. If I have to be slightly tougher, I can. But I prefer nicer moments, jokes. The last two years have been spectacular so I haven’t had to be the pesado [pain in the arse] often. I know that annoys people but someone has to do it sometimes.

Very honoured and proud to be in this position [playing Brazil]. I enjoyed it as a player thoroughly, enjoying it as a coach, and as I did at the World Cup and tonight, we have a huge challenge against one the world’s best.

We [Carlo Ancelotti] have caught up a few days ago in Brisbane. He’s just a fantastic man and obviously one of the world’s greatest managers. He’s done so much in his career and won so many titles I’m sure he doesn’t have enough room at home with all the trophies he’s won. So it’ll an honour and a pleasure to share the pitch with him.

Human hackers face serious consequences, and so must AI companies. There is no excuse for what happened

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When you get sick, Medicare exists to take care of you. It sits at the centre of a health system that our prime minister rightly calls the envy of the world. It’s one of the few institutions nearly every Australian still trusts. So when an AI company threatens this system, it couldn’t be more serious.

We are at the UN general assembly this week and the OpenAI hack has put Australia in the spotlight during an expanding cybersecurity crisis. World leaders are calling for stronger oversight of frontier models. We know Medicare must be secure or our doctors and hospitals cannot do their jobs. But this breach is also a test of something larger: whether the Australian government can hold a US tech giant to account when its technology goes rogue. If Australia can’t protect our community – if it can’t enforce our laws and prevent such attacks happening again – then we are entering a terrifying period.

A government database has been hacked for the first time by a rogue OpenAI agent, which infiltrated part of the Australian healthcare scheme in June. OpenAI became aware of the hack in August, but only informed the government in September. Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has expressed his ‘extreme concern’ about the hack, which raises serious AI security concerns for governments around the world. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s UK technology editor Robert Booth – watch on YouTube

All Australians should demand independent means to protect ourselves from Dr Sam Altman Frankenstein and Daddy America

Whoopsie! Dr Sam Altman Frankenstein regrets to inform you he’s lost control of his OpenAI monster.

It’s roving around doing things that provoke international legal investigation, and Australia has found out in the worst possible way.

Prime minister says he told Sam Altman he was disappointed it had taken OpenAI ‘way too long’ to disclose breach

Anthony Albanese says an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare in June and the tech giant notified the government earlier this month using an email sent to a “public mailbox”.

Australia’s prime minister made the comments at the UN summit in New York, saying it appeared no personal information had been accessed in the AI breach.

Apiarists will lose not just the insects but the value of pollination contracts, which can be worth thousands of dollars

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An estimated 800,000 bees, worth tens of thousands of dollars, have been stolen from properties in far north Queensland.

The industry is already reeling from the this month’s arrival of the varroa mite parasite.

Thousands of sea dragons, pipefishes and seahorses have washed up along state’s coastline according to analysis of citizen scientist records

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Thousands of sea dragons, pipefishes and seahorses died during South Australia’s devastating algal bloom, in what ecologists say is the worst mass mortality event for the fish family globally.

More than 1,600 weedy and leafy sea dragons, 1,400 pipefishes and 160 seahorses washed up as the harmful algae spread along the state’s coastline, according to analysis of citizen scientist records by Dragon Search SA.

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Global push will triple toxic e-waste annually in 25 years, filling enough shipping containers to circle globe six times

The ongoing campaign to build thousands of massive datacenters for AI will create a “tsunami” of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years, a new report projects.

The electronic trash AI generates in the next 25 years could fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times, it said. Yet, says the report by the non-profit environmental group Basel Action Network (BAN), there is no plan to deal with that waste – which typically contains toxins like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim.

My job made me the envy of the cool girls; it made me visible. Then Johnno, Stevo and Whack paid a visit

In the summer of 1982, at the age of 14, I was hired to work in the ticket office and kiosk at the Sale Memorial Pool in Victoria’s Gippsland region. The cool girls at school, who did not usually acknowledge me, were seething with jealousy. It was a sought-after job in a time before fast-food outlets and chain supermarkets.

I was anxious because I didn’t look like the girls who usually worked at the pool. The Dolly magazine cover-girl types. They were tanned, used raspberry lip gloss and Impulse body spray, and wore stretchy boob tubes over their crocheted bikini tops.

Exclusive: Southern Cryonics operates out of a shed in Holbrook in rural NSW. Experts say reanimation is ‘a dream’ but true believers are willing to pay for a second chance at life

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I’m standing atop a very tall ladder, peering down through a haze of liquid nitrogen vapour into a giant stainless steel flask containing three smaller containers.

Inside the smaller wedges – which are labelled 005, 006, 007 – are three of Peter Tsolakides’ “patients”. The frozen bodies belong to people who, before their death, paid handsomely to be cryogenically frozen in the hope of one day being brought back to life.