Higgs Boson Posing, Without Boasting

Hi, it’s Stephen Wolfing again. Yesterday we surpassed the BBC’s clear and concise explanation of how the Higgs boson works by distilling their minute or two down to one image. But the Greenygrey Higgs boson story does not end there. No readers, it certainly doesn’t. In this blog we will provide photographic evidence to show how the Greenygrey was part of the Higgs boson discovery at every stage.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Site

In this aerial view of the LHC site, where the Higgs boson was found, we can see evidence of the Greenygrey in fields and lakes, trees and sky:

Inside the LHC Site

Here we can see that the Greenygrey was not only above the surface. Oh no, it was also combining with precision below the surface too:

The Greenygrey of the Higgs Boson

And the Greenygrey didn’t end there folks. No, we can also see the greenygrey at work in the Higgs boson particle itself:

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.

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.