China Bans Foreigners From New Spy Museum
BEIJING – A new Chinese spy museum exhibits guns disguised as lipstick, hollowed-out coins used to conceal documents and maps hidden as a deck of cards.
What you won’t find there, however, are foreigners.
A sign outside the Jiangsu National Security Education Museum in a park in the eastern city of Nanjing states that only Chinese citizens are allowed inside, a policy designed to keep the communist regime’s cloak and dagger methods secret — no matter how timeworn they may be.
“We don’t want such sensitive spy information to be exposed to foreigners, so they are not allowed to enter,” a spokeswoman for the museum, who would only give her surname as Qian, told The Associated Press by telephone.
“Most of the people we turn away are pretty understanding since this is not your average museum,” she added.
MSNBC (thanks, Eliza)
Edwardians Discovered “Twitter” First
In the days before micro-blogging, text messages and social networking sites, the public were using the humble postcard to impart their thoughts and opinions.
Introduced in 1902, the picture postcard, containing an image on one side and room for writing on the other, became an instant hit according to a study by Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitan universities.
Using Postmaster General reports, researchers calculated almost six billion postcards – an average of 200 per person – were posted in Britain between 1901 and 1910. With up to 10 postal deliveries in major cities a day at this time, the medium allowed users to write and respond quickly and cheaply, the study found.
Like Twitter, which restricts users to 140 characters per ”tweet”, postcard writers only have a limited amount of space to pen a message. The study concludes: ”We suggest that the low price and efficiency of the Edwardian postcard has meant that as an informal written communications technology it was not equalled subsequently until the 21st century.”
Telegraph (thanks, Eliza)
Don’t forget you can chat to Derren on twitter @derrenbrown. We take no responsibility for loss of bowel control that may arise from tweeting.
Ice Cream Really Can Control Your Brain
Before you flip open that tub of Ben and Jerry’s, be aware that ice cream really can control your brain and say “eat me.”
A U.S. study by UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas has found that fat from certain foods such ice cream and burgers heads to the brain.
Once there, the fat molecules trigger the brain to send messages to the body’s cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation — for up to three days.
“Normally, our body is primed to say when we’ve had enough, but that doesn’t always happen when we’re eating something good,” said researcher Deborah Clegg in a statement.
“What we’ve shown in this study is that someone’s entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time. Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets “hit” with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin.
“Since you’re not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat.”
MSNBC (thanks, Eliza)
Hypnotize like Derren Brown
Yes yes – we’re well aware of the shameless self promotion at a time like this. But more than a few hundred emails about how to stick people to various surfaces without the use of glue have flown in and we are responding to them. I’m sure we will have more later.
So – you want to learn to hypnotize (going with the US spelling) people. There is a way to do this properly and the mind mingler himself is more than happy to charge you a few quid to do so. There’s some bunkum around the subject and we’re well aware but Mr Brown will put you right.
Learn the key techniques behind successful hypnotism, including the preparation of your subject, inducing a trance and awakening your victims. It is only 38 minutes long – but believe me you really need to study, take notes and practice this audiobook to get results.
Click the button below for a direct link to it on iTunes:
As has been mentioned in the comments below, you can also now pre order all 3 extracts on CD at amazon:
Click here
Derren Brown – The Events – How To Beat A Casino
Will Derren’s ambitious final event, in which he stakes a member of the public’s money on a casino roulette wheel, see him win £175,000 for one viewer? After successfully predicting the lottery, Derren plays lady luck again, taking an unsuspecting viewer on a heart-stopping journey as they watch him gamble £5,000 of their savings on the single spin of a roulette wheel. The lucky (or unlucky) viewer won’t even know it’s their cash until Derren calls them.
Also, head over to C4.com/derrenbrown to view the published results of the remote viewing experiment that some of you may have taken part in this week.
NOTE: Please don’t go ringing telephone numbers that were on the old version of this trailer – some poor bugger out there is wondering what he did wrong! 
– thanks.
How to be a Psychic Thief
Watch how Derren Brown gets a stranger to steal a television in DERREN BROWN: HOW TO BE A PSYCHIC SPY tonight at 9pm on Channel 4. After sitting in the same cafe as Derren Brown, this man walks in and takes a plasma television from a shop on one of London’s busiest streets.
In the third of The Events, Derren will perform an ambitious nationwide experiment with viewers, attempting to project a single image into all of our minds. At the end of the show, the image itself will be revealed to see how it compares with the one produced by viewers and to find out whether even the master of the impossible can make the country visualise something they couldn’t possibly have seen.
winners wear red: how colour twists your mind
IMAGINE you are an experienced martial arts referee. You are asked to score a number of taekwondo bouts, shown to you on video. In each bout, one combatant is wearing red, the other blue. Would clothing colour make any difference to your impartial, expert judgement? Of course it wouldn’t.
Yet research shows it almost certainly would. Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round.
The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769). “If one competitor is strong and the other weak, it won’t change the outcome of the fight,” says Norbert Hagemann, who led the study. “But the closer the levels, the easier it is for the colour to tip the scale.”
This is just the latest piece of research suggesting that exposure to certain colours can have a significant effect on how people think and act. Up to now most of the research has focused on red clothing in sport, but other colours and settings are being investigated too. It is becoming clear that colours can have an important, unappreciated effect on the way your mind works – one that you really ought to know about.
New Scientist (thanks, Tiram)
Do Brains Work Differently for Lefties, Righties?
WINDSOR, Ont. — Kristen Kaploun knows, first-hand, all about the degree of misunderstanding between right-handed people and the world’s lefties.
Her left-handed brother often complained that everything was unfairly designed for the right-handed.
She was told her mother used to come home from school with a reddened left hand, the result of having her knuckles rapped by teachers determined to make her write with her right.
Now the graduate neuropsychology student from the University of Windsor is making it the focus of her research to increase understanding of how “left or right handedness” affects how the brain processes language and words.
The doctoral student, who — for the record — is right-handed, says for years science simply “left out the left-handed” when researching how the brain processes information. It was known right-handed people processed language in the left brain hemisphere. But if the opposite were true for lefties was never studied.
Canada.com (thanks, Tiram)
Conspiracies Debunked: Simulation shows why World Trade Center towers fell
National Geographic has a fascinating simulation of why the US World Trade Center towers collapsed after the planes hit them on September 11 2001.
It’s part of a program investigating “science and conspiracy”. Basically, it’s because the fuel in the (nearly-full) tanks caught fire, which weakened the columns, which bent slightly, which meant that the roof – and other floors- fell in.
We know that from the real-life example, of course. But it’s interesting to see it demonstrated here. Not, of course, that this will satisfy the wingnuts who think it was a conspiracy. Their loss.
But sometimes this is what engineering is about: figuring out why things happen after the event. (Other videos on the National Geographic site ask whether controlled demolition could have done the same job, and whether the hijacked planes were replaced by planes carrying explosives.)
Charles Arthur at the Guardian.
Update from Phillis: Now all you have to work out is why building 7 fell down entirely of it’s own accord and was announced on the BBC 15 minutes before it actually happened. For us I think this may offer up some explanations as to a possible cause – however there are plenty more instances that need some good explaining. We have offered this video up as a resource for debate due to it’s growing popularity and it in no ways represents our views. If there are structural engineers out there that can pick this apart / back this up then please do.
CNN News reporter screams at Richard Dawkins
I don’t have a great dislike of CNN at all – but when 2 people are using modern microphones in high tech television studios is there any real need to scream at the interviewee like your life depends on it. Along with the dreadful questions posed it’s a classic case of trying to sensationalise an issue that actually needs calm and sensible debate. Oh and YES THE TITLE IS MEANT TO BE IRONIC!!!!
