LIFE ON PLUTO? CLOSER LOOK OPENS INTEREST

Armstrong’s first steps for humanity were like a baby reaching a doorway; humanity hasn’t taken many more, or left our small room.

“New Horizons transformed Pluto from a fuzzy telescopic dot, into a living world with stunning diversity and surprising complexity,”

I was recently alerted to a new image of Pluto by a BBC Horizon documentary (available in the UK on iplayer for another 19 days), and a further search led to a NASA article with research from a historic fly-by five years ago, where that Pluto quote derives from (and the BBC documentary too!).

My Neil Armstrong ‘one small step… one giant leap for mankind’ quote introduction was inspired by a Facebook image.

Pluto Interest Close Up

I think the new Pluto evidence is a good example of how there are zillions more things about the universe we don’t know than we do (as Socrates said the wisest people are those who know they know little 2500 years ago), as we take our first baby steps in the universe… with no chance of humans reaching Pluto in our lifetimes.

While the technology used is amazing and I really appreciate them sharing, there’s no plans to go back to find out more, although they’re trying to work out how a lander could work, and how to get funding!

Humanity’s advances in my lifetime have been amazing, but for most things we’re still trying to work out what’s going in the far distance by sight and theory only – often trying to make calculations from other places, like ancient sailors may have thought all islands on Earth had the same flora and fauna!?

A field just looks green, lifeless and barren from afar, but when you get up close, you see all the colours, life and contours. I think it’s the same in space, as the Pluto evidence suggests; and who knows what’s over the ‘New Horizons’!? 

It was also partly what I was writing about; along with personal and Earthly matters; in my fantasy fiction and philosophical introspection magnum opus…

New Mirror Poem from Writer Genius Wordsmith

I started having these ideas last night, so they would have been philosotea if I’d drank tea at tea-time, but I didn’t drink it yesterday, and just had a couple of coffees, as the second one was a bit late. I was listening to a new album by the Spacelords, and think it helped my mind rise, as Goldray did last year with their POPtastic (PinkyOrangePurple) Rising record.

A new band to me, The Spacelords also had a great greenYgrey world cover for their Liquid Sun album.

Too Late for Managenius

With lots of talk about football manager genius this week, and having created my wrIus writer/ing-genius word for myself (and others who follow, or that have already been) – such new words combining parts of two others are called blends according to the Oxford Dictionary – I thought last night I hadn’t heard managenius used. So I looked it up, and think I was right about a football context, but it has been used by a French management consultancy.

I also had a few ideas for new Folding Mirror poems, or parts of the same one:

double negative fm
can tell badness of others as side with dark side (written about in my bipolarity poetry)
interpret my behaviour from wrong basis

I started off with the idea of writing it this morning, in a state of complete coffilosophy, although the spirit of philosotea. It ended up being a little different, but with some similarities, leaving the door open for another poem or two from the ideas above.

The title was inspired by an article I read this week about chimps, and how they share our dark side, suggesting an evolutionary link. I loved chimps when I was young, mostly inspired by the PG Tips advert I think, so I’ve been disappointed to see they’ve got a dark side, but accept it. However, the good news of chimps’ similarity to humanity is that on this year’s series of Animals With Cameras a chimp was shown washing its hands, cleaning its teeth and thoughtfully weaving together a nest from leaves (clip available on website above – don’t know if available outside U.K.).

I laugh to myself because I think a lot about other things while zoning out to the television, even if the programme’s interesting; I think down to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but don’t know how far I am on the spectrum? I often have to rewind programmes having missed a few minutes, as I’ve written about before, and included in my poetry.

That’s one of the reasons why I consider it dangerous to be around one-dimensional people in the new ‘Big Brother’ age!

Advertised Childhood Chimpanzee, Evolutionary Family Tree

Gogglebox guilty
laughing to myself
while bad news
on television
looking around
hoping see
still free
amongst 21-C humanity

face value judgements, predictably negative sentiments

 complex 3-D brain
maybe sane
channelling pain
thinking beyond
modern media
view in front
wanting to write
innocent beauty

Gogglebox is a programme revolving around watching people watching television.

Special Animal Skills from Dogfish Evolution

A type of lanternfish of the genus Diaphus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hi, it’s Stephen Wolfing, science expert at the Greenygrey. I saw a fascinating story today about how smalleye pygmy sharks use hormones to make cells glow, enabling them to hide from predators. It reminded me of the Greenygrey ability to chameleonise… especially as they’re a type of dogfish! Here’s an account in the Huffington Post:

The researchers… suggest sharks evolved this ability from an ancient organism that would have used these hormones to change their skin pigmentation from light to dark (or vice versa) as a form of camouflage. So while melatonin would’ve lightened the skin of this predecessor, prolactin would have darkened it. Today, these hormones would work as a type of pigment shade, either moving the pigment cells in front of the light-emitting organs (covering them up) or retracting them to expose the glow. Essentially, the sharks now regulate their bioluminescence by changing the degree of pigmentation covering the photophores.

In the smalleye pygmy shark, prolactin pulls the pigment shade over the photophores to dim the glow, while lantern sharks seem to have co-opted this mechanism to produce brighter and shorter bursts of light for communication. As such, Claes and his colleagues suggest the pygmy shark is more closely related to this ancestor than the lantern shark.

“This study is really interesting because it suggests the pygmy shark to be the missing link in the evolution of luminescence in sharks,” Claes told LiveScience.

Pedigree Dogs and Wild Wolves: the Truth

Image via Wikipedia

Hi, it’s Harry Silhouetteof-Wolfhowlingonhill. Last night there was a good but sad documentary about how pedigree dogs have been bred into deformity by decades of human engineering. Pedigree Dogs Exposed: Three Years On showed how dogs’ skulls and bones have been changed into totally different shapes in under a century; like an evolution of convenience for humanity’s vision, rather than the animal’s health. The dogs have trouble living a normal life, and even breathing in some cases. It’s available on BBC iplayer in the UK; don’t know about other availability: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01cqp75/

Also, tonight at 10 on BBC4 there’s a Natural World documentary on the Wolf Pack (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0078ps7). I think I’ve seen it before, and it’s a warts n’ all documentary, so not all good for wolves, but is a balanced look at the wolf and how it really lives (unlike the wolfophobia of The Grey film!).

How Wolves Became Dogs: Fox Evolution

Hi, it’s Harry Silhouetteof-Wolfhowlingonthehill. Yesterday I discussed a video showing a wolf in the house, and how an experiment showed it could not be trained like a dog. Although dogs and wolves are 99.8% genetically similar, nurturing pups from five days old did not work. The wolves acted wild by eight weeks old, and did not take notice of commands like the dog pups they were compared to.

How Wolves Became Dogs

While wolves could not be nurtured from young, a Siberian experiment may explain how wolves turned into dogs over many generations. Silver foxes were selected for their tameness – showing no fear or aggression towards humans. Only 1% of the candidates were chosen. They were then bred together.

Within three generations over fifty years, the ‘tame’ bred foxes were affectionate towards humans. They were described as perfect pets: independent as cats, devoted as dogs.

Not only was their behaviour ideal, but their physical appearance also changed to appeal to humans. Their tails became curly, their floppy ears lasted longer when young, their limbs and tails became shorter than their wild counterparts. Basically, they came to look more like dogs. An example of evolution working over a short period of time?

Main Point of the last Two Blogs

While the BBC’s Horizon: Secret Life of Dogs documentary provides a lot of fascinating information, the main point of bringing it into the Greenygrey world was to show that wolves are not the demons of fairy tales. They are just dogs that have not been domesticated.

Here’s the video: