20 January: Blue Day

Today is Blue Day. Blue is the colour we see when light with a wavelength of about 450-495 nanometres hits our eyes. Ten more things you might not know about the colour blue.

1. Feeling blue? Using the word blue to mean downcast and depressed dates to the 15th century. It's thought to have derived from the bluish tinge a person's skin gets when their circulation is poor or they are deprived of Oxygen.
2. In the Bible, the colour blue is mentioned 34 times in the book of Exodus. There are only 15 other mentions of blue in the Good Book, none of which are in the New Testament.
3. Mosquitoes are thought to be particularly attracted to the colour blue.
4. Blue pigments for painting were first made from minerals like lapis lazuli and azurite, ground into powder and mixed with oil or egg white. Cobalt was used to make blue for stained glass, while dyes for fabrics were made from woad and indigo. In the middle ages, only poor people wore blue, because they could only afford poor quality woad dyes. In Italy, only one guild of clothmakers was allowed to use blue dye. There were severe penalties if anyone else did it.
5. The making of woad dye was particularly disgusting. The leaves of the woad plant would be soaked in human urine for up to a week, ideally pee from men who'd been drinking a lot. Then the fabric would be steeped in this mixture for a day and left to dry in the Sun, where it would turn blue as it dried.
6. The sky and the sea appear blue because blue has a short wavelength relative to other colours and gets more scattered by the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, or in water, so more of it hits our eyes. The phenomenon is known as Raleigh scattering after the scientist who discovered it. The same principle is at work in people with blue eyes. There is no blue pigment in their eyes, just less melanin, which means blue light is not absorbed but reflected so the eyes appear blue. Distant mountains look blue because of something called atmospheric perspective in which the further away something is, the less contrast it has with its surroundings, usually a blue sky. Hence in art if something is painted blue, it appears to be further away than objects painted in Green or red.
7. In surveys, over half the respondents say blue is their favourite colour. People associate it with harmony, faithfulness ("true blue"), masculinity, confidence, infinity, cold, calm and concentration.
8. Blue was seen by Muslims as a much less important colour than green, which was said to be Mohammed's favourite. There was a law in Moorish Spain which said only Muslims could wear green or white, so Christians and Jews would wear blue. Perhaps that's one reason why the Virgin Mary is so often depicted in blue - another is that blue pigments such as ultramarine were the most expensive - only the best for the Virgin Mary. While today we see blue as a colour for boys, as recently as the early 1900s it was the colour for girls, because of its association with the Virgin Mary.
9. Police uniforms are blue because Robert Peel designed the jackets of his original police force in dark blue so they would look different to the red jackets of the soldiers who had been responsible for law and order before that.
10. In Turkey, blue is the colour of mourning. In China, it's associated with ghosts, death and torment, and the villain in Chinese opera will wear blue make up. In Thailand, the colour blue is associated with Fridays. Any person born on a Friday can adopt blue as their colour.

NEW!

A Tale of Two Sisters

During a battle with supervillains, a horrific accident leaves the Warner family with no option but to believe their youngest daughter, Jessica, is dead. It doesn't occur to them that the bad guys could, or would, save her.

Jessica wakes up with no memory of who she is or how she came to be on a space station with two bionic legs, a bionic arm and a bionic eye. She is told her family abandoned her and is sent back to Earth with a mission - to kill them. While Jessica wants to kill her family, along with the twin boys who once rejected her, she knows what the Alliance of Supervillains are asking her to do is a suicide mission. She decides to get her revenge in her own way.

As Jessica puts the first part of her revenge plan in motion, she finds herself with an agonising decision to make. Before she can decide, the Alliance come for her, determined to make her do their bidding. This time, it's the Alliance who leave her, crippled and at the mercy of the Warner family, who have no idea who the Alliance's Black Rose really is.

Jessica finds herself having to re-think her decisions in light of what she now learns about her family, the Alliance, the twins, and herself. It would appear the Alliance have left her with an unwanted and permanent reminder of her time with them. Or have they?

Jessica's older sister, Jill, knows her destiny is to be a doctor and specialise in bionics and genetic variant medicine. She is also hopelessly in love with Christopher, Crown Prince of Galorvia. Can their romance survive the lies Christopher told her when they were both at school, an unplanned pregnancy and Sophie, the wannabe princess who comes between them?

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