The Skeptic’s Dictionary Short and Irreverent E-dition
Some of the definitions in the Skeptic’s Dictionary will bring a smile to anyone’s face. I (Phillis) own a copy and whilst it reads a little like a joke book of debunking, it’s always interesting. Not to be taken too seriously it’s a lot of fun and if you want a nice little taster the website is featuring it’s favourites. Here’s a few of ours:
Angel therapy: pretending to get messages from angels to guide patients; good way to avoid liability.
Dolphin-assisted therapy: swimming with animals that may be diseased and may bite in order to enhance one’s sense of wellbeing.
Mozart effect: marketing strategy for a number of devices, including music CDs: claim listening to Mozart’s music while in the womb will make your child smarter; recommended by 9 out of 10 politicians ignorant of science and basic human development.
More at Skepdic
Dictionary available from Amazon here
Best Derren Brown Show Ever? – Vote Now!
Channel 4 are holding a vote for the best Derren Brown Special, the winning episode will be shown on a special Derren Brown Night in January 2011.
“Derren Brown has undoubtedly brought some amazing television to our screens, his unique methods and abilities have enthralled the nation many times over.
Using his uncanny ability to misdirect, manipulate and mesmerise, the psychological illusionist has performed astounding feats that have left both the subjects and audience astonished.
Channel 4 will be celebrating with a Derren Brown Night in January 2011, and we need your help – Derren and executive producer Anthony Owen have picked a shortlist of their six favourite specials – but we need you to vote for the winner – the best Derren Brown show ever!
To help you decide we’ve got reminder clips and refresher episode guides here, so get watching and get voting!
Here’s Derren’s guide to his top six specials:
Russian Roulette Live
Back in 2003 was the first of my themed televisual specials – the controversial Russian Roulette Live. Over 12,000 members of the public applied to be the person who loaded the bullet. I didn’t realise I was that unpopular.
Séance
The following year I invited a dozen students to participate in a séance to contact the dead. We also asked the viewers at home to call in to the programme to let us know if anything unusual was happening to them at home. And many did. It remains one of the most complained about television programmes of all time.
Messiah
In 2005 I travelled across the USA under a variety of false names to see if I could persuade psychics, new age experts, UFO abductees and preachers that I had amazing super-powers. Which, of course, I don’t…
The Heist
The following year we made The Heist, in which I attempted to psychologically manipulate a group of attendees at a business training seminar. I wanted to see if I could convince them to rob a security van in broad daylight.
The System
In 2008 came a special called The System in which I anonymously taught a member of the public a horse racing gambling system which was 100% guaranteed.
Hero at 30,000 Feet
And finally, my most recent special in which an unsuspecting member of the public, Matt Galley, applied to take part in a television game show and had his worst fears – and his life – transformed.”
Kim Rugg – A London artist’s knife skills and knack for precision
“”Some people like taking their time,” says artist Kim Rugg, whose artistic achievements are measured in millimeters, used X-ACTO blades and picas. We spent the afternoon with Rugg in her London home and studio talking about her work re-imagining newspapers, comics, stamps and cereal boxes using their existing form while rearranging their content. Kim finds inspiration from the mundane and common objects around us. Her wicked knife skills and tenacious attention to detail have created a body of work that is as impressive as it is curious.”
Via Cool Hunting (Thanks @moonylein)
Robots Have Decided Humans Taste Like Bacon
“That robot in the picture is kinda’ cute, isn’t it? Just don’t wave your hand around in front of its face like a small wounded animal.
Wired reports that some jackass built a robot that identifies human flesh as bacon. From their article titled “Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon”:
“Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, “an electromechanical sommelier”, capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses…like “tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was.”
But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.”"
Read more at Dateline Zero (Thanks Johnny5)
Scientists Look to Recreate Big Bang
“Talk about a trip back in time. Scientists have always wondered what it was like at the moment of and immediately after the creation of the universe, generally known as the Big Bang. Soon, they may find out.
By using the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC — researchers will attempt to create, essentially, mini-Big Bangs that will help them study matter that once existed almost 14 billion years ago.
OK, if this all sounds a bit heady — especially for those of us who wonder how we’re going to get by until the next paycheck comes around — let’s break this down a bit.
First — and we might as well start at the beginning — the Big Bang theory (apart from being a very funny TV sitcom) suggests that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago when extremely high energy caused a rapid expansion of what is theorized was a very hot and dense state, and it continues to expand outward.
The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN at its laboratory near the French-Swiss border.
The machine sits in a 17-mile-in-circumference underground tunnel near Geneva and is used to study what the known universe is made of and why it works the way it does. Fundamental particles are made to collide inside the accelerators, and this helps scientists understand more about the laws of nature.
Researchers hope that by colliding lead ions inside the huge LHC “Big Bang machine,” they’ll be able to recreate what the young universe looked like.”
Read more at AOL News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to
“Sick of chasing down climate denialists himself, Nigel Leck put his programming skills to use for him. He created the Twitter bot @AI_AGW, who also goes by the name “Turing Test.” Every five minutes the bot searches Twitter for tweets relating to climate change denialism, and automatically responds to the posters using a database of hundreds of rebuttals, which include links to information and videos. Christopher Mims at Technology Review talked to Leck about the project: “The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge.”
Some of @AI_AGW’s debates have gone on for hours or days, with the recipient not knowing they are talking to a bot, even though its handle says AI and it includes a link to the Wikipedia page on the Turing test. The program is smart enough to run through a list of responses, which is especially helpful when debating with people who keep throwing the same arguments at you time after time.
Leck has seen all different kinds of responses to the bot, but most fall into two categories, he told Mims:
“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.” The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.”
Read more at Discover Magazine (Thanks @powerofstrange)
Fish species stay alive on land with special skin
“A new study shows how an amphibious fish stays alive for up to two months on land. It’s all in the skin. Mangrove killifish are small fish, only about an inch or two long, that live in temporary pools in the coastal mangrove forests of Central and South America and Florida. During dry seasons when their pools disappear, the fish hole up in leaf litter or hollow logs. As long as they stay moist, they can survive for extended periods out of water by breathing air through their skin. But oxygen isn’t the only thing a fish out of water needs to worry about, according to Professor Patricia Wright, a biologist from the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has studied these fish for years. “All cells in the body need the right combination of ions and water for an animal to stay alive,” Wright explains. “Normally, the gills are responsible for these processes in fish. We knew that in mangrove killifish the gills are likely useless on land, so how these fish maintain ion balance out of water was a mystery.”
Wright’s latest research, published in the November/December 2010 issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, shows that the skin of the mangrove killifish picks up the slack for the gills. Through a series of laboratory experiments, Wright and her team found special cells called ionocytes clustered on the skin of the fish. Ionocytes, normally found on the gills of other fish, are the cells responsible for maintaining the right balance of water and salt in a fish’s cells. “We found the mangrove killifish have roughly as many ionocytes on their skin as on their gills,” Wright said. Other fish species have skin ionocytes in larval stages of development, but usually these cells disappear in the skin as the fish develops.”
Read more at Physorg (Thanks @moonylein)
Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds
“It sounds like something a wild-eyed basement-dweller would come up with, after he complained about the fit of his tinfoil hat. But military bureaucrats really are asking scientists to help them “degrade enemy performance” by attacking the brain’s “chemical pathway[s].” Let the conspiracy theories begin.
Late last month, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 711th Human Performance Wing revamped a call for research proposals examining “Advances in Bioscience for Airmen Performance.” It’s a six-year, $49 million effort to deploy extreme neuroscience and biotechnology in the service of warfare.
One suggested research thrust is to use “external stimulant technology to enable the airman to maintain focus on aerospace tasks and to receive and process greater amounts of operationally relevant information.” (Something other than modafinil, I guess.) Another asks scientists to look into “fus[ing] multiple human sensing modalities” to develop the “capability for Special Operations Forces to rapidly identify human-borne threats.” No, this is not a page from The Men Who Stare at Goats.
But perhaps the oddest, and most disturbing, of the program’s many suggested directions is the one that notes: “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.” That’s right: the Air Force wants a way to fry foes’ minds — or at least make ‘em a little dumber.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks Chris)
The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses
“This is one of the most surprising and awesome tales ever told in the history of medicine. These twins are Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Their brains and sensory systems are networked together, but they have separate personalities. Their story defies belief.
So much, in fact, that Tatiana and Krista Hogan shouldn’t be alive at all. Their chances of surviving the pregnancy, birth and first months of life were almost zero. Surprisingly, they turned four on October 25, and they are still healthy and happy, as you can see in the photo above.
They play Nintendo Wii games against each other, they fight for toys and they share food and physiological functions. But they also share their senses. For example, one can pick an object out of her field of view, while the twin looks at the object.
Most importantly, however, they can share each other thoughts, like their grandmother—Louise McKay—describes:
“They share thoughts, too. Nobody will be saying anything, and Tati will just pipe up and say, ‘Stop that!’ And she’ll smack her sister.”
Scientists are nothing short of absolutely amazed. Here you have two kids, completely different from each other, with their own distinct personality, but with connected brains and sensory systems. Dr. Douglas Cochrane—neurosurgeon at Vancouver’s Children’s Hospital—has tested their networking abilities:
“Their brains are recording signals from the other twin’s visual field. One might be seeing what the other one is seeing.”"
Read more at Gizmodo
Scenes of thought: The brain in pictures
“What does your mind look like? A new book, Portraits of the Mind by Carl Schoonover, looks at how scientists have visualised the brain through the centuries.”
Above: “Olfactory bulb
In 1875 the physician Camillo Golgi invented the reazione nera (black reaction) cell-staining technique, which allowed anatomists to view individual neurons in their entirety for the first time. Potassium dichromate and silver nitrate are added to preserved nervous tissue, and the neurons become visible as tiny silver chromate crystals form inside the cells.
Golgi used the technique to make detailed neuronal maps, such as this drawing of a dog’s olfactory bulb, made in the year he discovered the reaction. The technique became widely known as “Golgi’s method” and marks the beginning of modern neuroscience. ”
See more at New Scientist (Thanks @nettmac)
