Paralympics Opening Ceremony and Horizon Universe Documentary

Hi, it’s Stephen Wolfing, science correspondent at the Greenygrey. Watching Channel Four, I was thrilled to see that my human version in the parallel universe planet Earth thingy, Stephen Hawking, opened the London Paralympics 2012 last night, with an inspiring message about reaching for the stars.

The opening ceremony went on to provide lots of fun, moving and spectacular displays, including some greenygrey ones:

Horizon: Mapping the Universe

The opening ceremony’s emphasis on science and space was nicely timed after the BBC‘s Horizon this week covered the attempts being made to make a 3-D map of the universe, and the current theories on the size and contents of the universe or universes.

Amongst many things, it thoroughly explained how our understanding of the observable universe is limited to what light has had time to reach us, and that galaxies are not moving away from each other; the gaps between galaxies are widening because the universe is still expanding.

It ended by showing how the universe is thought to be infinite, and could be one of an infinite number of such universes.

Valentine Poem about Venus and Jupiter over the Moon

Marc Latham’s latest Folding Mirror poem mixes up Valentine week with news from the One Minute Astronomer newsletter that Venus and Jupiter are getting very close this month, and will also have the moon near them at certain times. The photo above, copied from the One Minute Astronomer site,  shows what it should look like. Here’s the poem:

Valentine Night Sky

Venus sings love songs
on a winter residency
starting after sundown
dazzling through the night

visage allure attracts valentine

planet travelling across sky
toward the enchantress
over a horizon moon
Jupiter serenades my star

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:

Wolf in the House: Cute not Killer

Hi, it’s Harry Silhouetteof-Wolfhowlingonthehill. Our blog about the demonisation of the ‘big bad wolf’ on Celebrity Big Brother the other day got me thinking. So I searched for an old BBC Horizon documentary I saw called The Secret Lives of Dogs.

Wolf in the House on Documentary

The video featured footage from a research experiment in Hungary. Wolves were reared in a house, and they tried to train them like dogs.

They found that by 8 weeks the wolves were different. The wolves had their own ideas, and didn’t listen to orders. The nurturing didn’t work.

But the wolves weren’t nasty or dangerous, they were just disruptive and uncontrollable.

The footage lasts on this video from about 3:30 minutes to 7:50 minutes. The wolf coverage is preceded by a clever collie. After the wolf coverage it is shown how a group of foxes were tamed over a long period of time, and I’ll discuss that tomorrow.

Cleveland Way Photos from Scarborough to Robin Hood’s Bay

Image via Wikipedia

Update: There are now photos from the Cleveland Way trip up on Picasa Greenygrey: Robin Hood’s Bay and Scarborough.

Hello, it’s Green.  Wow, what wonderful sunny weather it is in the UK.  From the end of September and now into October Britain is having a bit of an Indian Summer; and the best spell since April!  Fantastic, and be sure to top up your vitamin D in time for hibernation, but I wouldn’t overdo it; I saw Marc Latham sunburnt in Portugal this year, and it wasn’t a pretty sight!

Green Divides into its Constituent Colours

With blue and yellow dominant in the sky instead of my ol’ buddy, Grey, I thought I’d try and dig into my heritage and try and divide myself into my constituent colours, so that I might communicate better with the sky.

So I went to the lovely Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire, via sunny Scarborough, where I also found lots of Greenygrey evidence on the ground.

Anyway more about that later, and back to my division.  You know what, I did it.  And had a nice time talking with my parent colours.

Greenygrey is a Double Middle

And it got me thinking how when Grey and I are together we are a double middle, with Grey’s parent colours black and white.

That got me thinking about that tv documentary about colours and how humanity developed colour distinction a long time ago.

Green and Grey Born From Original Colours

In that programme, Horizon’s Do You See What I See?, they explained that humanity originally saw everything in black and white, which are Grey’s parent colours.

Then humanity developed the ability to see in blue and yellow, which are my parent colours.

So Grey is like the older more archetypal side of us, while I’m the newer and more created.  Fascinating, don’t you think?

Green Thinking about Identity

Image via Wikipedia

In the above image, both squares and circles are really the same colours.

Hi, it’s Green.  I was catching up with Grey’s latest Werewolf of blogs, and read that it saw a television documentary called The Code, and that it made Grey wonder if green and grey are dominant colours in nature and the human mind.

We are still rebuilding communications with Oz, so cannot bring the blogs into the Greenygrey world at the current time.

Horizon: What is Colour, and How does it Influence?

No sooner had I read that, than I read an article by our ol’ buddy, Marc Latham, on Suite 101, about a Horizon documentary that had the latest research on how colour is created and how it influences us.

It theorises that colour is subjective and influenced by society and language. Colour can also influence our moods and behaviour.  I’m happy to say that green is usually considered good by the human mind, with red its negative opposite.

The programme is available until September 19th on the BBC website, but I don’t know if it’s available in your human world country.