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Remember?

Tartan trews at half-mast? Feathery hairdos? "Bye-Bye Baby"? The original boy band is back.

The Bay City Rollers are getting together again and hope to cut a new album (as they used to say in those far away-days of Rollermania). Considering the astonishing current enthusiasm for other 1970s groups like Abba, and, yes, even Mud, it was always unfair that the Rollers became the band that never was, forgotten, an embarrassment, just airbrushed out of history.

Even the Wombles got a bigger slice of the retro-action. But the Rollers' tunes were just as melodic as Bjorn and Benny's and their lyrics well up to Mud's standards. "And we sang shang-a-lang and we ran with the band and sang do-wop-be-doobie-do-aye." Sorry, got carried away, there.

Anyhow, having spent 20 years not speaking to each other, Alan, Woody, Eric and Les are putting matters right. Les (McKeown, lead singer) explained that "we wasted a lot of time being angry with each other". How true, Les, how true. "You've got to give a little love, take a little love, be prepared to forsake a little love `til the sun comes shining through'."

Natural prawn killer

Despite its size (about a foot long), and a 200-million year history dating back to the Jurassic Age, the mantis prawn has only just been discovered at the bottom of Sydney harbour.

It is interesting to scientists because it can strike at its fish prey in five milliseconds and has the most complex vision of any invertebrate. "If it were the size of a shark it would be the most fearsome creature in the sea," as the biologists put it.

It is interesting to Australia's barbecuing community because it tastes good. Eat with care.

Monotreme sensation

Another exciting antipodean throwback. A duck-billed platypus has been born in captivity for the first time since 1944, and only the second time in history, at the Healesville Sanctuary in Melbourne. The event has been described as the zoological equivalent of reaching the peak of Mount Everest. The platypus (an egg-laying mammal or monotreme) is, like the mantis prawn, another of evolution's great survivors. But big prawn, tough as they may be, had better watch out. They are a favourite food of the platypus, which catches them using electro-receptors on its bill. Truly a primeval struggle.

Image of the Week

"And what happens if I press this button?" Never let a control freak loose in a Tornado fighter.