Blogs / Discoblog

Who knew sharper images and clearer sound would be good for our feathered friends? Come January 15, Hawaii will be the first state in the U.S. to switch over to digital TV, a month before the mandatory nationwide conversion on February 17. But the interesting part about the switch isn’t so much when but why: Federal wildlife officials suggested tearing down the old analog transmission towers earlier to avoid interference with the nesting season of a bird, the endangered Hawaiian petrel.

Petrels, also known as the ’Ua’u, are only found in Hawaii, and more than 1,000 of them nest on the slopes of Maui’s Haleakala volcano, where the analog towers are currently located. The nocturnal species, which reportedly has a chirp that sounds like a yapping puppy, is not adapting well to urban sprawl: The birds are disoriented by city lights and sometimes get caught on wires. Officials think rebuilding the towers at a different location, away from the petrel’s nesting sites, will give them some peace to nest, and help the species’ survival in the long term.

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Do you dream in color, or black and white? The answer may depend on the TV you watched as a child. New research shows that baby boomers who grew up watching black and white TV still often dream in grayscale while their kids dream only in color.

Eva Murzyn of the U.K.’s University of Dundee asked 60 people, half over age 55 and half under 25, to keep detailed dream diaries. She also collected information about the kind of TV and films they watched as children. More than 20 percent of the older group reported having black and white dreams, but less than 5 percent of the younger group reported them. A few of the older subjects who’d been exposed to color film and TV as children also rarely dreamed in black and white. The shift in dream palette directly coincided with the popularization of color TV in the 1960s. (It also means that pre-TV generations would have dreamed only in color.)

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