come along to TV filming!
So with two more nights left of the tour, I’m back into TV production the moment I walk in my front door. There are a couple of exciting and stupidly ambitious projects in the air for later this year, and we’re filming bits and pieces for them this week and over the coming months. Some of these segments will require audience members. If you’d like to come along and be part of an audience, please do email derrenbrownteam@gmail.com along with your name, age and address and they’ll get back to you. And I shall very much look forward to seeing you at the filming.
Thanking you x
A hard chair equals a hard heart
“The next time you are sitting in a car dealership negotiating a purchase, make sure you are sitting on a hard chair – you will drive a harder bargain.
Psychologists have found that the texture and feel of objects around us, even those we are sitting on, can affect the way we think and behave.
In an experiment in which volunteers engaged in mock haggling over the price of a car, those sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were tougher negotiators than those in soft, comfortable ones.
“It is behavioural priming through the seat of the pants,” said John Bargh of Yale University. “Our minds are deeply and organically linked to our bodies.”
In a series of six experiments, researchers from Yale, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed how our sense of touch – the first of our senses to develop – influences our social interactions throughout life.”
Read more at The Independent
New York man builds his own nuclear reactor
“A web designer from New York has revealed a home-made nuclear reactor which he’s constructed himself in a Brooklyn warehouse.
Mark Suppes is said to be the 38th independent physicist in the word to achieve nuclear fusion from a self-built reactor.
The 32-year-old amateur physicist says the device cost him £25,000 and he built it because he sees it as a possible future energy technology.
Suppes and other “fusioneers” are hoping to work out how to create more power from fusion then the process currently consumes. But the odd news of their neighbours activities will no doubt concern local residents… then again, this is Brooklyn.
Fusion reactors are legal in the US and are said to pose no radioactive threat – unlike nuclear fission reactions – because they don’t use uranium or plutonium.”
Read more at News Lite
Creationists suffer another legal defeat
“The Institute for Creation Research — one of the biggest nonsense-peddlers in the 6000 year history of the world — was handed a nice defeat this week. That link to the National Center for Science Education (the good guys) has all the info you need, but to summarize: the ICR moved from California to Texas. In the previous state, for reasons beyond understanding, they were able to grant Master’s degrees in their graduate school. But Texas didn’t recognize their accreditation, so they filed to get it approved.
Not so surprisingly, scientists and educators rose in protest, and in 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board — the organization that grants accreditation — denied the ICR. The creationists appealed. In the meantime, they also tried to extend their ability to grant degrees temporarily while the lawsuit continued. What happened this week is that the extension as denied.
And I mean denied. Check out what the court said:
It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff [the ICR] to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information.”
Read more at Discover Magazine
How Scientology Avoids Paying Tax in the United Kingdom
It’s alleged Scientology has avoided paying tax in the United Kingdom by claiming it is run out of South Australia. In Britain, the Church of Scientology is supposed to pay tax on the millions of pounds it brings in each year. Now, the organisation has been accused of claiming its entire UK operation is part of its Australian outfit.
The Independent Senator Nick Xenophon is one of South Australia’s favourite sons. He championed the former members of Scientology who spoke out about the abuse inflicted on them. This latest intrigue surprised even him.
“When you look at the fact that the three directors are based in the UK, that returns haven’t been filed for the South Australian entity in over 30 years you’ve got to ask what on earth is going on,” Xenophon said.
Full article at TodayTonight
Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist
“Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox, predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.
Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said homo sapiens will not be able to survive the population explosion and “unbridled consumption,” and will become extinct, perhaps within a century, along with many other species. United Nations official figures from last year estimate the human population is 6.8 billion, and is predicted to pass seven billion next year.
Fenner told The Australian he tries not to express his pessimism because people are trying to do something, but keep putting it off. He said he believes the situation is irreversible, and it is too late because the effects we have had on Earth since industrialization (a period now known to scientists unofficially as the Anthropocene) rivals any effects of ice ages or comet impacts.
Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”
Easter Island is famous for its massive stone statues. Polynesian people settled there, in what was then a pristine tropical island, around the middle of the first millennium AD. The population grew slowly at first and then exploded. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct, both with devastating consequences. After about 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century.
Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.””
Read more at Physorg
Brain Structure Corresponds to Personality
“Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people’s brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.
Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain.
For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Several links were found between the size of certain brain regions and personality. The research appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
For example, “Everybody, I think, has a common sense of what extraversion is — someone who is talkative, outgoing, brash,” says DeYoung. “They get more pleasure out of things like social interaction, amusement parks, or really just about anything, and they’re also more motivated to seek reward, which is part of why they’re more assertive.” That quest for reward is thought to be a leading factor in extraversion. Earlier studies had found parts of the brain that are active in considering rewards. So DeYoung and his colleagues reasoned that those regions should be bigger in people who are more extraverted. Indeed, they found that one of those regions, the medial orbitofrontal cortex — it’s just above and behind the eyes — was significantly larger in study subjects with a lot of extraversion.”
Read more at Science Daily
Light Stencil Urban Art
“Graffiti-ridden derelict sites have been given a much needed face-lift with extraordinary light art by Tigtab. Each image is created with the help of stencils. These intricate designs are revealed after a burst from a camera flash lights up the inside of the box. In this picture, a pond scene is created in a flooded derelict building
She said : “My photos are predominantly shot using urban backdrops. I find beauty in decay – those abandoned and forgotten places all around us. By bringing light into the darkness of each space, it fills that space for a moment in time, and highlights both their beauty and impermanence”
Much like Banksy, Tigtab, from Melbourne, Australia, keeps her identity a closely guarded secret.”
Read more at The Telegraph
Fishy Gene Hints at How Limbs Evolved From Fins
Two genes found only in fish may be a key piece in the puzzling evolution of limbs.
The genes’ removal from zebra-fish embryos resulted in the loss of actinotrichia — a basic fin component — and made their proto-fins resemble appendages seen in ancient fossils of the first four-legged creatures.
“The loss of actinotrichia may have contributed to the evolutionary transition from fin to limb,” wrote researchers led by University of Ottawa biologists Jing Zhang and Marie-Andrée Akimenko in a study published June 23 in Nature.
During early embryonic development, fins and limbs look strikingly alike. In fish, however, some cells form a pattern of fine fibers. These are the actinotrichia, which form the scaffold on which fin rays are assembled.
In their study, Zhang and Akimenko noticed that two genes, actinodin 1 and 2, are especially active during zebra-fish fin development. These proved to code for previously unknown proteins that mix with collagen to form actinotrichia.
Subsequent searches of animal-genome databases found the actinodin genes in other bony fishes (including whale sharks, living fossils little changed in the 400 million years since the Devonian, before limbs evolved) but not in mammals, birds or amphibians.
When the researchers knocked actinodin genes out of zebra-fish embryos, actinotrichia didn’t form in the resulting fishes’ pectoral fins. Their tails, however, were unaffected. That fits with the evolutionary narrative suggested by fossils of the earliest known four-limbed creatures, which kept their fishy tails even as legs started to form.
Read more at Wired (Thanks DG)
Dog blown 20 miles away in strong wind
“A dog has reportedly been reunited with its owner after being blown 20 miles away in a storm.
The dog was renamed ‘Lucky’ by 57-year-old Agnes Tamas after it survived being swept away from the Hungarian village of Gesztered, Photonews Agencia Noticiosa reports.
Tamas said: “I saw the roofs of the local houses being ripped off one by one, and I ran into my garden to try and get to the cellar.
“I couldn’t believe it when the dog house flew up into the air – complete with my dog cowering inside. It was like something out of the Wizard Of Oz.”
Kalman Csutor, who called the Red Cross after finding the dog following a local radio appeal, added: “He was pretty shaken.
“I have no idea what happened to the dog house or whether the wind carried him all that way – but when I found him he was 20 miles from home.”"
Read more at Digital Spy
