9 April: Ears

On this date in 1731, the inciting incident for the War of Jenkins Ear occurred. 10 facts about ears:

1. The average ear is about 2.5 inches long. The average ear lobe is 0.74 inches long and 0.77 inches wide.
2. Ears never stop working, even when we’re asleep. We’re not aware of most of it because the Brain ignores most of the sounds unless it’s something that could be a threat. Then the sound wakes us up.
3. Do our ears continue growing as we get older? An increase in the size of a person’s ear is more likely to be the result of cartilage breaking down which makes the ear sag and appear to get longer.
4. The hardest bone in the human body is the temporal bone, which protects the inner ear. The ear also contains the three smallest bones in the body, the stapes, the incus and the malleus.
5. The human ear can pick up sound wave frequencies as low as 20 Hz and as high as 20,000 Hz.
6. We have two ears to help discern which direction a sound is coming from. People who are deaf in one ear are less able to work out the location of a sound. The two ears also specialise in different types of sound. Our right ear is more responsive to speech, while the left is more receptive to continuous tones and musical sounds.
7. Talking of sounds, scientists at Newcastle University have identified the sounds we hate the most. They include: a fork scratching on a plate, nails on a blackboard, a baby crying, an electric drill, rusty swing chains, a person retching and two pieces of expanded polystyrene rubbing together.
8. Being pinched on the ear or dragged along by the ear were accepted methods of punishment in Roman times. If an offender didn’t appear before the Praetor at the appointed time, the injured party was perfectly within their rights to go find them and drag them to court by the ear.
9. The Eustachian tube is the part of the ear that regulates pressure around the eardrum. It’s connected to the back of the throat, which is why, at high altitudes, swallowing can equalise the pressure and make your ears “pop”.
10. Ears also help you balance. There’s a maze-like structure inside your ear called the vestibular system. It’s filled with fluid and tiny hair cells which detect the rotational movement of your head.

Character birthday

Falconeer, aka Dawn Sinclair, who, while playing truant from school, found a falcon’s egg, about to hatch. She took the chick home and cared for it, naming it Peck. The egg had arrived via the wormhole from Infinitus and so the bird had the power to forge a psionic link with Dawn. As Peck grew, Dawn’s parents told her she must get rid of it, so Dawn ran away from home, taking the bird with her. She was befriended and taken in by “Mom”, the matriarch of a gangster family who had relocated to Britain where she could start a gangster gang of her own rather than being subservient to her husband and sons. Dawn became part of that group, the Desperadoes. Read about her in Over the Rainbow.

Over the Rainbow

'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

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