Day: 26 July 2007

Some Interesting Prehistoric Stuff

I love to browse the Sci-Tech page (page 154) on BBC1\’s Ceefax (teletext) service. There\’s always a lot of interesting snippets culled from various sources such as the New Journal of Physics, Nature and Science magazines. My favourite areas of interest are astronomy and space exploration, and palaeontology, and here are a couple of palaeontology snippets from recent pages:

Apparently scientists in Germany, Switzerland and the US claim that they\’ve found the point at which the African and Indian elephants split and diverged from a common ancestor. They compared genetic research done on both species and other research done on the extinct woolly mammoth and mastodon, and came to the conclusion that the split occurred 7.6 million years ago.

Another interesting snippet concerns the dinosaurs. Accepted theories state that when the dinosaurs first evolved, they swept all before them, and rendered the earlier, more primitive forms of reptiles (known as dinosauromorphs) quickly extinct. Apparently that\’s considered now not to be the case, and both lived side by side for many millions of years.

Just a couple of interesting snippets from the pages of Sci-Tech. Go to Ceefax page 154, and git yerselves ejjicated a bit. 🙂

Heroes Debuts on UK Television

The first two episodes of Tim Kring\’s Heroes, Genesis and Don\’t Look Back, aired earlier tonight (Wednesday 25th) on BBC2, followed by a short ten minute behind the scenes thingy, Heroes Unmasked. I must say that I\’m absolutely delighted. I\’ve been following its progress since it started on satellite TV, and it\’s nice to see this series coming to a more general audience on terrestrial TV. It\’s also nice to be able to watch it all from the start again.

The first episode seems to start off as a slow-tempo kinda X-Men clone, but it soon finds its own niche and transforms into something quite different. Conspiracies abound and there\’s lots of great action and complex stories ahead, so all the UK terrestrial TV viewers are in for a treat. And it is soooooo nice to see a series about super-powered folks, and not a single glimpse of a cape or tights (I\’ve always thought that capes \’n\’ tights look really naff on-screen – they only really work in comics or animation).

Heroes, along with Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, is right at the top of my list of current favourite sci-fi TV series. So let\’s roll on next Wednesday night, BBC2 at 9pm, and episode 3.