Latest news with #WonderfulWizardofOz
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'I had no idea Australian city is so lush, sophisticated and funny'
Throwing a couple of sunglasses into my suitcases, along with hats, shorts and some very, very heavy-duty sun cream, I sang: 'I'm off to see the Wizard – the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.' At which point my husband asked: 'Darling, why are you packing to watch a film on television? And it's not going to be on for ages. Christmas is months away.' Very funny. 'Not that Oz,' I replied. 'I'm going to be Australia's own Dorothy. Throw another shrimp on the barbie because Sydney, here I come.' I've always wanted to see Australia, not least to check out if koala bears really exist. And so, in lieu of a house swept up in a tornado, a la the original Dorothy, I opted for a rather more comfortable means of getting there via a Qantas double-decker. It's 22 hours flying time from London to Sydney, possums, so if you can I'd recommend breaking it up with Singapore or Hong Kong. But I was extremely keen to get there, so I did it in one go, with the result that when I got off the plane, the combination of the sheer beauty of the place and jet lag really did make me feel as if I'd woken up in an alternative reality. And I'd landed the furthest I'd ever been from home. First impressions: I absolutely loved it. Sydney is so green it could easily be the Emerald City, while it was far more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than I'd been expecting (Dame Edna would have a lot to answer for and yes, I know she was from Melbourne.) And the Australian sense of humour is dry and laconic, very similar to ours. The city is beautiful and the spectacular Sydney Opera House is worth those 22 flying hours alone. In pictures, it looks as if it's slightly separate from the main body of the city, but actually it's right at the heart of everything. People who are not going to see a performance congregate there because there are many bars and restaurants dotted around. A chum who has lived in the UK for 20 years but is a Sydney native, says she always arranges to meet friends there. The locals, incidentally, have been known to observe that it looks like nuns in a rugby scrum. Inside, the building is vast and cavernous and home to a number of theatres, including one which housed the Australian Ballet performing Nijinsky and I scored myself a ticket. Ballet, champagne – the Aussies live very well – and the most spectacular views over the harbour? Strewth, this is my kinda town. But we Dorothys are made of stern stuff and as well as knocking back fizz and appreciating high culture, there's a city to explore. With three clicks of the heels of her red shoes Dorothy could soar to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge – but the rest of us are more prosaically able to climb it. In total, it takes about three hours and provides you with more world-class views. Incidentally, you are breathalysed for safety before you're allowed on the bridge, so hold back on the fermented fruits of the country's numerous vineyards the night before. My personal Yellow Brick Road was George Street, which runs through the heart of the commercial and business district, which is also the best shopping area in the city. You can take the girl out of the Kansas shopping mall but you can't take the Kansas shopping mall etc etc. Check out the Queen Victoria Building, home to shops and cafes. There you will find international brands as well as Australian designer labels, which tend to be very brightly patterned – absolutely beautiful. I recommend Camilla and Leona Edmiston, where, in lieu of red shoes, I invested in a beautiful red silk dress. A local speciality, incidentally, are Australian opals, and you will find many jewellery stores selling them. Sydney is a very modern city but, of course, it is part of a history that extends back 65,000 years. There is a great deal of debate about what to call the people who were originally there before Europeans, including among those people themselves, but I'm going with indigenous on the grounds that it doesn't seem to offend anyone. And so I found myself on a Guided Tribal Warrior Cultural Cruise, a tour of Sydney harbour by boat. 'Here are the life jackets in case there's an iceberg in the harbour,' said the skipper (it was a boiling hot day and I told you the humour is laconic). We sailed to Clark Island, once a sacred ground for some of the indigenous people and these days, while much of it is open to tourists, there are some bits you must stay away from. We were shown around by a very personable indigenous brother and sister team – he played the didgeridoo to welcome us on to the island, and if you're a woman, here's a heads up – didgeridon't touch it. Not culturally sound. There we learned about ancient methods of fishing and farming while the men in our group were taught how to perform a traditional courtship dance. It is the women who choose their partners in this matriarchal society, although it is also said in the West that men chase and women choose. More in common under the skin and all that. And you can't visit Sydney without going to the beach. Bondi is the most famous one but another option, and it is worth it, is Manly Beach, a short ferry ride from Circular Quay, near the Harbour Bridge. We walked through the centre of the pleasant suburb to Cabbage Tree Bay – many restaurants were advertising Manly fish, which I first took to be extremely macho ocean life and then suddenly realised they were local fare. You can snorkel to get close-ups of oceanic life or simply wade through the surf and the fish will swim up to say hello. Or will they? Were they swimming – or circling? This is Australia, after all. The most common fish is the grouper: the male of which is blue and the female brown. He can fertilise up to five females, but if he dies, the strongest female will change sex, turn blue herself, and start fertilising off her own back, or gills, or whatever it is that fish do. They're very pragmatic in Oz. Two of us stopped at a local cafe where I learned about a speciality you will find everywhere. 'I'll bring you some banana bread,' said the waitress, magicking up a loaf and some butter enhanced with maple syrup. 'No I couldn't possibly, it's totally against my diet,' I said. 'Oh my word that smells amazing. Perhaps another slice.' No wonder this is such a sporty culture, they need to work off all the fantastic Aussie cuisine. I never did get a shrimp from a barbie but the fish I did have was superb. It was Australia that gave us fusion cooking, originally a combination of Japanese food and that of the West. On the way back to the ferry I stopped at a shop called Budgy Smuggler to buy, yes, a budgie smuggler for my very own Wizard of Oz – he laughed uproariously when he saw it but strangely has yet to try it on – before going back to sample the multiple delights the city has to offer. The tranquil Royal Botanic Garden is home both to indigenous species and those brought in from abroad. It also offers stunning views of the Opera House and the bridge from across the harbour. Slightly further out is Taronga Zoo, where you can both stay and dine and appreciate yet more spectacular harbour views. And the zoo is probably your best bet to see a koala bear as their natural habitat has been damaged in recent years. My only complaint about Sydney is that I didn't have enough time there. There are numerous museums, art galleries, restaurants – you could spend weeks there and never be bored. Would I go back? Like a shot and this time for longer. The whole place is magical. Simply wizard, in fact. GET THERE Qantas flies from Heathrow to Sydney starting at £1,475 return, £3,097 in Premium Economy. BOOK IT Rooms at The Langham hotel, Sydney, start at around £240 a night. MORE INFO
Al Jazeera
26-04-2025
- Science
- Al Jazeera
Have scientists discovered a new colour called ‘olo'?
A team of scientists claims to have discovered a new colour that humans cannot see without the help of technology. The researchers based in the United States said they were able to 'experience' the colour, which they named 'olo', by firing laser pulses into their eyes using a device named after the Wizard of Oz. Olo cannot be seen with the naked eye, but the five people who have seen it describe it as being similar to teal. Professors from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington School of Medicine published an article in the journal, Science Advances, on April 18 in which they put forth their discovery of a hue beyond the gamut of human vision. They explained that they had devised a technique called Oz, which can 'trick' the human eye into seeing olo. The technique is named after the Wizard of Oz. In the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, Frank Baum wrote about a man who uses tricks to fool the residents of the fictional land of Oz into thinking he's a wizard. For instance, it is believed that the Emerald City, the capital of Oz, is so bright and vibrant that visitors have to wear special glasses to protect their eyes. The glasses are one of the wizard's tricks, since they make the city appear greener and grander. The human eye perceives colour via three types of photoreceptor or 'cone cells' in the retina. S cones pick up shorter, blue wavelengths of light; M cones detect medium, green wavelengths; and L cones detect longer, red wavelengths. 'The signals from these cones are then sent through a complex series of cells in the retina that act to clean up and integrate the signal before passing it down the optic nerve through parts of the brain,' Francis Windram, a research associate at the department of life sciences at Imperial College London, told Al Jazeera. The part of the brain that the visual information is passed to is the visual cortex. In normal vision, the function of M cones overlaps with the neighbouring S and L cones, so any light that stimulates M cones also activates the other two cones. The M cones don't function alone. 'There's no wavelength in the world that can stimulate only the M cone,' Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, explained in an article published on its website. 'I began wondering what it would look like if you could just stimulate all the M cone cells. Would it be like the greenest green you've ever seen?' So Ng teamed up with Austin Roorda, one of the creators of the Oz technology and a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley. Oz, which Roorda described as 'a microscope for looking at the retina', uses tiny microdoses of laser light to target individual photoreceptors in the eye. The equipment, which must be highly stabilised during use, is already being used to study eye disease. The work using Oz began in 2018 by James Carl Fong, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. Hannah Doyle, another doctoral student at Berkeley, ran the experiments through which human subjects were able to see the new colour, olo. The shade of olo has always existed, it just falls beyond the spectrum of shades visible to the human eye. There are other such shades that we cannot see. Hence, olo is not a new colour that has come into existence, from a physical or scientific perspective. However, 'from a sociolinguistic perspective, if people give new names to colours which previously were indistinguishable thanks to this technology, then maybe! It all depends on how you say it,' Windram said. Five people have seen the 'new' colour – four men and one woman. All had normal colour vision. Three of the subjects, including Roorda and Ng, are the co-authors of the research paper while the other two are members of the participating lab at the University of Washington and were unaware of the purpose of the study before they took part. Those who have seen olo describe it as a teal or green-blue colour – but one they had never seen before. In the article by UC Berkeley, it is described as a 'blue-green colour of unparalleled saturation'. 'It was like a profoundly saturated teal … the most saturated natural colour was just pale by comparison,' Roorda said. 'I wasn't a subject for this paper, but I've seen olo since, and it's very striking. You know you're looking at something very blue-green,' Doyle said. The researchers said an image of a teal square is the closest colour match to olo. However, this square is not an olo-coloured square. The naked human eye simply cannot see the shade. 'We're not going to see olo on any smartphone displays or any TVs any time soon. And this is very, very far beyond VR headset technology,' Ng said, according to a report in the UK's Guardian researchers are exploring whether the Oz technology could help people with colour blindness. Windram said success would depend on the cause of colourblindness in individuals. Deuteranomaly, which causes decreased sensitivity to green light, is the most common form of colour blindness. 'In this case, a miniaturised version of this technology could theoretically be used to correct this by directly stimulating the cones when the correct colour of light hits them,' Windram said. Windram pointed out that publicity materials for the research show images of the Oz experiment on a highly stabilised table. 'This would require a lot of work to miniaturise the technology, and is likely a long way off. Given that the laser must stably hit the correct cones in order to stimulate them, this may not really be feasible as a form of vision correction technologically,' he said. The concept of a colour has three main components, Windram explained: The physical, which has to do with the wavelengths of light that meet the eye; the neurological, which refers to how humans biologically process these light signals; and the societal or linguistic component, which pertains to how colours are named. 'In the end I may see a colour and call it 'red', someone else may call it 'rot' or 'rouge' … but also another may look at it a bit more closely and say 'well it's claret' or 'crimson'.' To test this, neuroscience and AI researcher Patrick Mineault developed a website for entertainment purposes in September 2024, on which users can take a test to see how their colour perception compares to others. Humans can also perceive colour differently due to differences in factors such as 'temperature' of light. This was demonstrated when a photo of a dress went viral in 2015, dividing social media users over whether the dress was white and gold, or blue and black. Windram explained that people who were deciding what colours the dress was were drawing on preconceived notions of whether the photograph of the dress was taken in warm lighting or cool lighting. Yes, different species can experience colours differently. For example, humans process three wavelengths corresponding to red, blue and green light, while the mantis shrimp, a tiny crustacean, can visually perceive 12 channels of colour instead of three. An article by the Australian Academy of Science explains that the mantis shrimp can also detect ultraviolet and polarised light, which humans cannot see. However, while the human eye can mix two colours and perceive an in-between shade – such as purple as a mix of red and blue – the mantis shrimp's eyes cannot mix colour receptors. Meanwhile, dogs only have two types of cones and can mostly only see shades of yellow and blue.
