Twist our words
Channel 4 have put together a rather random little website. Featuring some of the well known stars like Gordon Ramsey, Alan Carr, Jamie Oliver and of course Derren this little tool helps you construct twisted sentences with their words. The best ones will be shown on TV, so give it a go and see if you can put words in to the mouths of celebs – or just do what we do and try to make rude innuendoes.
Primates have hidden ability to repair their own damaged spines
For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that primates, including humans, have an innate ability to repair some spinal damage, including recovering from paralysis. The next step is to enhance this ability, so that we can regrow injured spinal nerves.
It’s been known for a long time that people with moderate injuries to the nerves in their spinal cords can sometimes spontaneously recover – regaining the ability to move and walk over time. Now a group of researchers have published a paper inNature Neuroscience that suggests this may be a trait shared by all primates. Many spinal injuries are followed by fresh nerve growth in monkey spinal cords.
How your brain is the same as a fruit fly’s.
Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.
But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.
So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.
Read the full article at Opinionator
Voices of the dead – The Last Tuesday Society
Inventor and crackpot musician Sarah Angliss will be giving a performance that will include the strange, mysterious and bizarre attitudes to early sampling technology:
In December 1877, a journalist writing in Scientific American noted there was a now ‘a startling possibility of recording voices of the dead’. He had just witnessed Edison recording sound on his new invention: the phonograph.
In this live demonstration, I’ll explore some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of audio recording, as I immortalise a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph.
Delving into the archives, I’ll also examine a little-known curiosity from the eighteenth century, one which may have been used to record short segments of sound 150 years before the phonograph.
This event will include some short, musical interludes incorporating a few of my own inventions. As I use the theremin to conjure up ‘music from the aether’, I’ll reveal how the first ‘electric servants’ were also seen as tools for paranormal investigation.
10 December 2010
The Last Tuesday Society
11 Mare Street
London E8 8RP
Tickets £4-£12
Full details of this performance (which by the way a few of the web team will be attending) here.
Tetris flashback reduction effect ‘special’
“The computer game Tetris may have a special ability to reduce flashbacks after viewing traumatic images not shared by other types of computer game, Oxford University scientists have discovered in a series of experiments.
In earlier laboratory work the Oxford team showed that playing Tetris after traumatic events could reduce memory flashbacks in healthy volunteers. These are a laboratory model of the types of intrusive memories associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this new experimental study the researchers compared the effectiveness of Tetris at reducing flashbacks with Pub Quiz Machine 2008, a word-based quiz game. They found that whilst playing Tetris after viewing traumatic images reduced flashbacks by contrast playing Pub Quiz increased the frequency of flashbacks.
A report of the research is published in this week’s edition of the journal PLoS ONE.”
Read more at The University of Oxford (Thanks Katherine R)
Ears Could Make Better Unique IDs Than Fingerprints
“On a planet hosting 6.7 billion human beings, having proof you’re unique is of tantamount importance. The ear, it turns out, may be the best identification yet.
Through a new shape-finding algorithm called “image ray transform,” which boasts 99.6 percent accuracy, according to a study presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics Sept. 29, the outer ear may prove to be one of the most accurate and least intrusive ways to identify people.
Fingerprint databases of U.S. government agencies alone store the records of more than 100 million people, but prints can rub off or callous over during hard or repetitive labor. With the advent of computer vision, researchers and identification industries are seeking easier and more robust biometrics to get their hands on.
“When you’re born your ear is fully formed. The lobe descends a little, but overall it stays the same. It’s a great way to identify people,” said Mark Nixon, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton. and leader of the research.
“There’s real power in using the appearance of an ear for computer recognition, compared to facial recognition. It’s roughly equivalent if not better,” said computer scientist Kevin Bowyer of Notre Dame, who is pursuing his own ear-recognition technology and not involved with Nixon’s work. “If you’ve got a profile image for someone, this is a great way to use it.””
Read more at Wired (Thanks Johnny5)
How fear flows through the mind
“A neuronal circuit in the brain acts like a seesaw to control fear impulses, reveals a surprisingly up-close look at neurons. Researchers have identified two neuron populations in the brain that work together to control fear impulses.
The findings, published this week in a pair of complementary papers in Nature, may someday facilitate the development of better therapeutic interventions for psychiatric illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias.
“A real exciting aspect of this work is how we’ve now come to understand the regulation of complex emotion — in this case fear — at a single cell level,” said Stephen Maren, director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research. “That’s a pretty impressive feat.”
The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brain involved in emotional memory and learning, has historically been considered key in processing fear impulses, but researchers at the California Institute of Technology wanted to understand the process at the level of cells. “Ultimately, we’d like a mechanistic understanding of how specific circuits, not only regions, generate brain functions like fear,” said Wulf Haubensak, a postdoc and first author on the first paper.
After conducting systematic screens for genes marking neurons in the amygdala, the team focused on one — a gene encoding protein kinase C delta, or PKC-δ, which was specifically expressed in a subpopulation of neurons that had not been studied in detail. “We decided to try and find out what these cells do,” said David Anderson, a biologist and senior author on the paper. ”
Read more at The Scientist (Thanks Johnny5)
Heads-up on a few things probably coming out
Subject to all sorts of possible changes, the following goodies (or baddies, really depends) are planned: the ‘Enigma‘ show should be broadcast (in it’s 3-hours-squeezed-into-one-and-a-half form) around mid-December, and hopefully in early January, a documentary about my good self will air for those who enjoy such things, alongside a broadcast of the most-voted-for-fave-special (you can vote, I am assured, here). My oldest pal from school (now a multi-award-winning filmmaker) was approached, quite by coincidence, to make the documentary, and it’s deepened our friendship and been a real joy exploring some nostalgic avenues together.
Also, in January, I’m quite excited that they’re planning to release a box-set of the stage shows (at least the ones that made it to TV). So Something Wicked, And Evening of Wonders, and Enigma will be all nicely packaged up for your DVD delectation. Imagine! What larks.
As you may know, I’m writing the new stage show, Svengali: the long and short of it is that we rehearse next January/Feb for the tour that starts in March. And somewhere in there we hope to film a new special, though when that will make the screens I have no idea.
Um, that’s it for now. Today I’m drinking tea and painting Patrick Hughes and I’ll show you that and the little story around it when it’s done.
Ta-ta,
D
Added by Abeo:
The Enigma DVD is available for Pre-order here (click here)
The Derren Brown Live Collection DVD is available for Pre-order here (click here)
RSA videos
Some terrific animated lectures by RSA on YouTube – I’ve been quite captivated all morning.
Nov. 12, 1935: You Should (Not) Have a Lobotomy
“1935: The world’s first modern frontal leukotomy is performed in a Lisbon hospital by Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz.
Moniz’s leukotomy (or leucotomy, from the Greek for “cutting white,” in this case the brain’s white matter) soon became popularly known as the lobotomy. It was not, however, the surgical procedure now generally associated with lobotomies. Rather, Moniz drilled two holes in the patient’s skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobes of the brain to destroy the tissue, in an effort to alter the patient’s behavior.
Within a year of Moniz’s procedure at Lisbon’s Santa Marta Hospital, American neurosurgeons Walter Freeman and James Watts had performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. Their approach, which they would continue refining in subsequent surgeries, also involved drilling holes, but instead of using alcohol they surgically severed the nerves connecting the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus.
With various refinements, this became standard operating procedure for the prefrontal lobotomy.
Lobotomies were performed on patients suffering from severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia and clinical depression, although its use on people identified as having social disorders was not unknown. That the lobotomy succeeded in altering a person’s personality and behavior is beyond dispute, but the results were often drastic, and occasionally fatal.”
Read more at Wired
