Is forensic science as reliable as we think?
Forensic science was not developed by scientists. It was mostly created by cops, who were guided by little more than common sense. And as hundreds of criminal cases begin to unravel, many established forensic practices are coming under fire. Popular Mechanics takes an in-depth look at the shaky science that has put innocent people behind bars.
The Events: Ticket waiting list
You can sign up to the waiting list over at ‘Lost in TV’ for tickets to ‘The Event’ recordings in September.
Register your interest at Lost in TV
All finished. All gone.
This year’s run is over, although I see that tickets are already dribbling out on sale for NEXT year. Plans are afoot to come to Cardiff, Dublin and Belfast in 2010. Currently no news on Scotland. PLEASE be a super luv and don’t email asking where we’re going: it should all get firmed up before not too long and we’ll let you know as soon as we do.
There was a lovely audience for the last night, so thank you very much, any of you who made it. After the show time was short: I had to clear out my dressing room so burst through a graceless signing. Apologies for being so rushed to those of you who waited back that night. I then went for a quiet drink with a friend (and ended up chatting to Jude Law until late BECAUSE THAT’S THE KIND OF LIFE I LEAD). Jen, Simon, Andy B, Iain, Jen and I had exchanged our presents over cocktail Martinis on Friday night, so that we cold all do our boring last-night clearing away on the Saturday. You may be interested to know that I gave Coops a Fortnum’s finest Beauty Of The Foot set for his unhappy and noisome tootsies.
I have a day to settle a few things at home, and then this week I am working on The Events and filming a trailer for them. You may remember towards the end of last year I posted a picture of me on the upper deck of a bus with a bunch of kids, saying it related to something this year. Now is the time I am hoping it may pay off, as it related to this September’s shows. More news when the time is right.
My apartment is full of builders’ dust, drilling and bottom cleavages. I’m sneezing and my desk is liberally betissued. The art exhibition starts next week and poor Coops, back after barely a day off, is busying himself with sorting out the pictures for it. Things are a fraction frantic, frenzied and frenetic. I get a little weekend away in Venice in a few days, which will be much-needed.
CURRENTLY READING (when I get the chance, like this weekend), the Phaidon pocket edition of Gombrich’s The Story of Art. It’s a glorious book, which I know well in the larger edition you’re more likely to be familiar with, but this handsome little carry-round conveniently suits my lifestyle-options and means I can re-read it while perving after some gondolier. Much love. x
Magic with Augmented Reality
Performer Marco Tempest has created a unique act in which classic card tricks are integrated with real-time AR; in this demonstration video, he shows both what’s happening normally and what’s brought to the performance by the computer.
Amsterdam craze: Smart Tossing
Amsterdam police are deeply concerned about a new craze in which vandals toss parked cars from the Smart brand into the city’s canals. The so-called ‘Smart tossing’ takes place mainly during the weekend, when many youths are out for a night on the town.
Read the rest of the article at Dutch Amsterdam
Milk Drinkers Live Longer
Research undertaken by the Universities of Reading, Cardiff and Bristol has found that drinking milk can lessen the chances of dying from illnesses such as coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke by up to 15-20 %.
In recent times milk has often been portrayed by the media as an unhealthy food. The study, led by Professor Peter Elwood (Cardiff University) together with Professor Ian Givens from the University of Reading’s Food Chain and Health Research Theme, aimed to establish whether the health benefits of drinking milk outweigh any dangers that lie in its consumption.
Importantly, this is the first time that disease risk associated with drinking milk has been looked at in relation to the number of deaths which the diseases are responsible for.
The review brought together published evidence from 324 studies of milk consumption as predictors of coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke and, diabetes. Data on milk consumption and cancer were based on the recent World Cancer Research Fund report. The outcomes were then compared with current death rates from these diseases.
Professor Givens explained: “While growth and bone health are of great importance to health and function, it is the effects of milk and dairy consumption on chronic disease that are of the greatest relevance to reduced morbidity and survival. Our review made it possible to assess overall whether increased milk consumption provides a survival advantage or not. We believe it does.
Nasa finds monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun
Nasa has found a monster black hole 100 million times the mass of the Sun feeding off gas, dust and stars at the centre of a galaxy 50 million light-years away.
The star-ringed black hole forms the eye of a galaxy called NGC-1097 which was photographed by the US space agency’s Spitzer Space Telescope in California. A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing, including whole planets, can escape being sucked in if they come within its reach. The galaxy in the photograph is spiral-shaped, like our Milky Way, and extends long arms of red stars into space. But Nasa said the black hole at the centre of the galaxy in which Earth is situated is tame by comparison to NGC-1097, with the mass of just a few million suns.
“The fate of this black hole and others like it is an active area of research,” said George Helou, deputy director of Nasa’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Some theories hold that the black hole might quiet down and eventually enter a more dormant state like our Milky Way black hole.” The picture shows a fiery ring (heh!) around the black hole (heh!) which is packed with brightly-burning newborn stars. ”The ring itself is a fascinating object worthy of study because it is forming stars at a very high rate,” said Kartik Sheth, an astronomer at Nasa’s Spitzer Science Center.
Are probiotics good for your health?
Felicity Lawrence (Guardian) recently came across an advert for a probiotic product. “Improves weight gain by 10%,” it said, “… proven in more than 40 scientifically designed and controlled trials.” A probiotics manufacturer boasting about weight gain? Surely some mistake? But the advert was insistent: “Maintaining the integrity of the gastro-intestinal flora effects increased weight gain,” it went on. She had strayed on to a farmers’ website. This is how probiotics are marketed for pigs.
Nearly 60% of UK households now regularly buy probiotic drinks. The market is worth £164m a year in this country alone. How and why that happened is a fascinating commentary of the nature of advanced capitalism and its genius for making consumers want whatever it has to sell. The food market in affluent countries is saturated. Growth cannot come just from making us eat more, since there is a limit to our physical needs. But tap into our deep-seated emotional needs and, as political commentator Neal Lawson points out in his new book All Consuming, there is no limit to what we can be persuaded to buy.
(more…)
Mind Reading: FMRI – Machine that Reads Your Thoughts – 60 Minutes
Here is a surprising method of MRI scanning that links up a computer to a massive list of words that reads your brain patterns and turns it in to words with surprising accuracy – without the use of a Derren Brown in the room.
US healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians, refuse to pay out
It was July 2007 and Wendell Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia. Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out.
What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.
For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. “It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America,” he told the Observer.
Potter resigned shortly afterwards. Last month he testified in Congress, becoming one of the few industry executives to admit that what its critics say is true: healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay out when many patients actually get sick. In chilling words he told a Senate committee: “I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
To Potter that is no surprise. He has seen all this before. In his long years with Cigna he rose to be the company’s top PR executive. He had an eagle-eye view of the industry’s tactics of scuppering political efforts to get it to reform. “This is a very wealthy industry and they use PR very effectively. They manipulate public opinion and the news media and they have built up these relationships with all these politicians through campaign contributions,” Potter said.
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