Derren Brown's Blog, page 32
May 11, 2011
Fruit Salad Tree Bears Eight Different Types Of Fruit
Spring is in the air and the flowers are a bloomin'. If your the gardening type, you know it's time to bust out the shovel and get to work. If you have a sweet tooth and enjoy growing fruit, you're gonna love this… An Australian company has fabricated a tree that can bear up to eight different fruits, yep and they call it The Fruit Salad Tree!
How the heck do you grow eight different fruits on a single tree? With an asexual plant propagation technique known as grafting. Typically grafting is used for the commercial production of trees and shrubs, however The Fruit Salad Tree Company utilized this technique to create the ultimate buffet of fruit super tree!
Full story at TechniGlee
May 10, 2011
Cognitive Neuroscience book reveals why humans believe in gods
Dr Andy Thompson claims, in his new book, that the human mind generates religious beliefs as part of an evolutionary process. The recent revolution in cognitive science demonstrates the reasons why we create such myths, why we spread them and want other people to believe them too. His book shows the mechanisms in which the human mind constructs dogma, powers religious institutions and how irrational constructs can be harmful to society and it's progression.
Every book bought contains a donation to the Richard Dawkins Foundation. The RDF finances research into the psychology of belief and religion, finances scientific education programs and materials, and publicises and supports secular charitable organisations.
It's essential reading for all those who are interested in religious belief (whatever side of the fence you're on), the way the mind works and gives an insight in to some of the recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and cognitive studies without being overly technical.
Play the game Phylo whilst performing important research
Though it may appear to be just a game, Phylo is actually a framework for harnessing the computing power of mankind to solve a common problem — Multiple Sequence Alignments.
Phylo is a game in which participants align sequences of DNA by shifting and moving puzzle pieces. Your score depends on how you arrange these pieces. You will be competing against a computer and other players in the community.
A sequence alignment is a way of arranging the sequences of DNA, RNA or protein to identify regions of similarity. These similarities may be consequences of functional, structural, or evolutionary relationships between the sequences. From such an alignment, biologists may infer shared evolutionary origins, identify functionally important sites, and illustrate mutation events. More importantly, biologists can trace the source of certain genetic diseases.
Inverted Art Made with Spools of Thread
Devorah Sperber is exhibiting at Art Paris – which brings together emerging and established artists in painting, photography, sculpture, and more. Sperber takes multi-colored spools of thread and arranges them in a way so that they appear like pixels. Taken as a whole, the spools look like a "hot mess," in other words, like your grandma went crazy and glue gunned her thread collection on a wall. Look through a "viewing sphere" (a small, transparent ball) that's conveniently placed in front of the piece, however, and get ready to be amazed. As Brooklyn Museum states, "Sperber deconstructs familiar images so that the brain can reconstruct them. Her framed crystal reproductions similarly address the way we think we see versus the way the brain processes visual information."
See more wonderful examples and more info of this at MyModernment
May 8, 2011
Learning how the brain does its coding
Most organisms with brains can store and process a staggering range of information. The fundamental unit of the brain, a single neuron, however, can only communicate in the simplest of manners, by sending a simple electrical pulse. The challenge of understanding how information is contained in the pattern of these pulses has been bothering neurobiologists for decades, and has been given its own name: neural coding.
In principle, there are two ways coding could be handled. In dense coding, a single neuron would convey lots of information through a complex series of voltage spikes. To a degree, however, this creates as many problems as it solves, since the neuron on the receiving end will have to be able to interpret this complex series properly, and separate it from operating noise.
The alternative, sparse coding, tends to be used for memory recall and sensory representations. Here, a single neuron only conveys a limited amount of information (i.e., there's something moving horizontally in the field of vision) through a simple pulse of activity. Detailed information is then constructed by aggregating the inputs of lots of these neurons.
Full story at Arstechnica
May 7, 2011
Chinese teenager has carried friend to school on back for eight years
In Hebei, China, 16-year-old Lui Shi Ching has carried his friend to school daily for the last 8 years. His friend Lu Shao has a congenital disorder which makes it difficult for him to walk.
Eight years ago on a rainy day, Lu Shao was stuck at school when his mother didn't come to pick him up. Lui Shi Ching, who was smaller than Lu Shao, decided to help and carried him home.
Full story at NTDWA
May 6, 2011
Female only lizard species that clones itself created in the lab
Arstechnica: Researchers have bred a new species of all-female lizard, mimicking a process that has happened naturally in the past but has never been directly observed.
"It's recreating the events that lead to new species," said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place."
Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves—a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization—were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.
Best-known among all unisexual species are Aspidoscelis, the whiptail lizards of southwestern North America, of which 7 of 12 species are unisexual. Genetic studies suggest their unisexuality emerged from historical unions of two sexually-reproducing lizards belonging to closely-related species, the hybrid offspring of which possessed mutations needed for parthenogenesis.
In two of the unisexual whiptails, that seems to have been enough; they immediately went all-female. In the other five, it took another round of traditional sexual mating. Those species are so-called triploids, bearing two sets of chromosomes from the original mother species and one from the father.
Full article at Arstechnica
May 5, 2011
Orson Welles May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985
Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (1873, Missouri – December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice Ives (1882 or 1883, Springfield, Illinois – May 10, 1924, Chicago, Illinois). His family was raised Roman Catholic. Despite his parents' affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago.
October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has recently come into question. Panic was reported to have spread (after citation from rumors) among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1970s "docu-drama" The Night That Panicked America was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.
In the 1940′s, Welles organized the Mercury Wonder Show, a touring magic and variety act put together to entertain U.S. soldiers going to war. He performed on many television shows and even had a prime time magic special taped (that unfortunately never aired).
May 4, 2011
Red letter day for Darwin Correspondence Project
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The project mapping Charles Darwin's life and work in the 15,000 letters he wrote or received during his extraordinary lifetime will be completed after a £5 million funding package was announced.
The awards, announced today by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), will ensure the full completion of the definitive, award-winning edition ofThe Correspondence of Charles Darwin.
More than 15,000 currently known letters written by or to Darwin will be published, in full, by 2022. The edition is the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project, widely acknowledged as the greatest editorial project in the history of science, and one of the major international scholarly projects of the past half-century.
It is jointly managed by the University Library and ACLS. By the time the edition is complete, locating, researching, and editing the letters will have taken several teams of scholars more than forty years. Summaries of all known letters are freely available to the public through the Project's website
More at CAM
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