Storms across Tasmania have brought some much needed relief to the bushfire crisis, with Hobart recording 17 millimetres this morning.

Luke Johnston, from the Bureau of Meteorology, said there is more to come including a possibility of hail.

In a statement, the Tasmania Fire Service (TFS) said the rainfall overnight had "eased the fire risk to a number of Tasmanian communities".

CityCat crews will strike again for 24 hours from Friday morning as unions argue the company running the CityCats for Brisbane City Council is replacing permanent staff with casual staff.

The company, Transdev, insists this is incorrect and the core issue is the scale of the wage increase.

It is the third strike by CityCat crews against Transdev since December 2018 as the unions continue their 12-month struggle to renegotiate the enterprise bargaining agreement with the company.

Queensland’s mining expertise could be the ticket to Space.

A paper published by a Queensland inquiry into job creation opportunities from the establishment of an Australian space industry said the sector needed skilled workers in manufacturing, technology, mining, aviation and defence.

Pam Melroy, from Nova Systems, argued Australians could bring the ingenuity they brought to operating in remote, harsh environments to bear in the next intergalactic steps planned to the moon and Mars.

There is more than $110 million in Medicare rebates sitting unclaimed as masses of Australians have not provided their bank account details to the government.

Human Services Minister Michael Keenan says about 670,000 people are owed money and insists it takes about one minute to provide the necessary information to receive the rebates.

Australians need to update their bank account details with the government to access the unclaimed Medicare rebates.

A Nepalese charity has been evicted from a Brisbane City Council-owned heritage building, after reportedly failing to pay rent.

The United Hands Foundation Australia moved into the historic 1920s-era building after council restored it and has run the Engine Room Cafe in Teneriffe since 2016.

Eight more state schools are set to re-open in the flood-affected Townsville region, taking the total number of schools re-opened to 20.

Education Minister Grace Grace has announced the appointment of a Disaster Recovery Coordinator to help flood-ravaged state schools get back to normal.

Ms Grace says alternative arrangements will be made for students from state schools which are unable to be re-opened.

Bees have a grasp of basic maths and are able to add and subtract, a joint Australian-French study has shown.

In an experiment with far reaching implications, scientists taught honey bees to recognise colours as plus or minus symbols.

Armed with this knowledge, they went on to solve basic mathematical problems set by the scientists.

The bees completed the tasks with a success rate of up to 75 per cent. Understanding how a tiny bee brain can do arithmetic could lead to better artificial intelligence (AI) systems, according to the Australian and French team.

While Australia suffered through its hottest January on record, around the world things aren’t much better.

The past four years - 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 - have been confirmed as the warmest years on record around the world, according to new research released by the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on Thursday.

Average global surface temperatures were 1.0 degree Celsius above pre-industrial times in 2018, the report said, based on data from US, British, Japanese and European weather agencies.

A second US politician has been embroiled in scandal, apologising for wearing blackface to a party in 1980 to impersonate a rapper.

Attorney General Mark Herring is second in line for for the governorship of the state of Virginia, where the Democratic governor and the lieutenant governor are already facing claims of scandal.

Herring, 57, who has served as attorney general since 2014, apologised for what he described as "callous and inexcusable lack of awareness."