Derren Brown's Blog, page 36
April 6, 2011
Manipulating morals: scientists target drugs that improve behaviour
THE GUARDIAN: "A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries – these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that reviews scientific developments in the field.
Drugs such as Prozac that alter a patient's mental state already have an impact on moral behaviour, but scientists predict that future medical advances may allow much more sophisticated manipulations.
The field is in its infancy, but "it's very far from being science fiction", said Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner.
"Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate," he said. "There is already a growing body of research you can describe in these terms. Studies show that certain drugs affect the ways people respond to moral dilemmas by increasing their sense of empathy, group affiliation and by reducing aggression."
Researchers have become very interested in developing biomedical technologies capable of intervening in the biological processes that affect moral behaviour and moral thinking, according to Dr Tom Douglas, a Wellcome Trust research fellow at Oxford University's Uehiro Centre. "It is a very hot area of scientific study right now."
He is co-author of Enhancing Human Capacities, published on Monday, which includes a chapter on moral enhancement.
Drugs that affect our moral thinking and behaviour already exist, but we tend not to think of them in that way. [Prozac] lowers aggression and bitterness against environment and so could be said to make people more agreeable. Or Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone … increases feelings of social bonding and empathy while reducing anxiety," he said.
"Scientists will develop more of these drugs and create new ways of taking drugs we already know about. We can already, for example, take prescribed doses of Oxytocin as a nasal spray," he said.
But would pharmacologically-induced altruism, for example, amount to genuine moral behaviour? Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner, said: "We can change people's emotional responses but quite whether that improves their moral behaviour is not something science can answer."
He also admitted that it was unlikely people would "rush to take a pill that would make them morally better.
"Becoming more trusting, nicer, less aggressive and less violent can make you more vulnerable to exploitation," he said. "On the other hand, it could improve your relationships or help your career.""
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Annette M)
April 5, 2011
Pakistani brothers 'dug up corpse and made it into curry'
GUARDIAN: Police in Pakistan have arrested two men for allegedly digging up a newly buried corpse and eating its flesh in a curry.
The two brothers are said to have cut the legs from the body of a 24-year-old woman and cooked the flesh in a steel pot. Some of the gruesome dish had already been eaten when police raided the brothers' home in a remote part of Punjab province.
A senior police officer, Malik Abdul Rehman, told the Guardian the brothers had been eating corpses for at least a year, but some local media reports alleged that they had been human flesh eaters for a decade.
Rehman said that the brothers, Muhammad Arif, 40, and Farman Ali, 37, seemed to have taken up cannibalism as an act of "revenge" after their mother died and their wives left them.
"It became an addiction for them," Rehman claimed. They boiled the flesh first, then cooked it in a curry, he said.
Full article at the Guardian
April 4, 2011
'Koran Burn Preacher' To Protest At US Mosque
YAHOO NEWS: "A militant preacher in Florida whose Koran burning triggered deadly riots in Afghanistan has vowed to lead an anti-Islam protest outside the biggest mosque in America.
The planned demonstration could further inflame tensions over the Koran burning, which led to two days of protests in Afghanistan that included the killings of UN staff and stoked anti-Western sentiment across the Muslim world.
"Our aim is to make an awareness of the radical element of Islam," pastor Terry Jones said at the church he leads in the college town of Gainesville, Florida.
"Obviously it is terrible any time people are murdered or killed – I think that on the other hand, it shows the radical element of Islam."
Jones, a former hotel manager turned pastor who claims the Koran incites violence, said he will go ahead with a protest on April 22 in front of the US' largest mosque, in Dearborn, Michigan.
US President Barack Obama denounced the act of burning a Koran but did not mention Jones by name.
"The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry," Mr Obama said in a statement released by the White House.
"However, to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity."
Government officials in Pakistan and Afghanistan have called for US authorities to arrest Jones, however his public criticism of Islam and desecration of the Koran are allowed under US laws protecting free speech.
Jones provoked an international outcry last year over his plan to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with Mr Obama saying it would cause "profound damage" to the US.
He backed down after pleas from the US government and other world officials, but then presided over a March 20 mock trial of the Koran that included a torching of the book.
Internet footage later reverberated across the Muslim world and sparked the latest wave of violence."
Via Yahoo News
April 3, 2011
World's first practical 'artificial leaf' unveiled
(ANI): Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have finally developed the world's first practical artificial leaf that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight at an economical cost, thereby achieving one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy.
They have described an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics the process, called photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy.
"A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades. We believe we have done it," said Daniel Nocera, who led the research team.
The new discovery shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries.
'Our goal is to make each home its own power station. One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology," said Nocera.
About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day, said Nocera.
Researchers Discover How Brain's Memory Center Repairs Damage from Head Injury
Neuroscience News: Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have described for the first time how the brain's memory center repairs itself following severe trauma – a process that may explain why it is harder to bounce back after multiple head injuries.
The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, reports significant learning and memory problems in mice who were unable to create new nerve cells in the brain's memory area, the hippocampus, following brain trauma. The study's senior author, Dr. Steven G. Kernie, associate professor of pediatrics and developmental biology at UT Southwestern, said the hippocampus contains a well of neural stem cells that become neurons in response to injury; those stem cells must grow into functioning nerve cells to mend the damage.
"Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has received a lot of attention recently because of the recognition that both military personnel and football players suffer from debilitating brain injuries," Dr. Kernie said, adding that memory and learning problems are common after repeated severe head injuries.
"We have discovered that neural stem cells in the brain's memory area become activated by injury and remodel the area with newly generated nerve cells," Dr. Kernie said. "We also found that the activation of these stem cells is required for recovery."
Full article at Neuroscience news
April 2, 2011
Fake: Seventy metal books found in cave in Jordan labeled most important find in Christian history
BBC news reported recently: They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born. A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007. A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol.
A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, and what he found inside might constitute extremely rare relics of early Christianity. The director of the Jordan's Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, says the books might have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion. "They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls," says Mr Saad. "Maybe it will lead to further interpretation and authenticity checks of the material, but the initial information is very encouraging, and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery, maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology."
However it turns out the are FAKE.
Peter Thonemann at Oxford has staked his career on the conclusion that the lead codices being discussed recently are forgeries executed within the last 50 years. The following is what he wrote to Elkington in an email after he was asked late last year to comment on the authenticity of the plates based on some photos:
A surprisingly easy task, as it turns out! The Greek text at the top of your photo no. 0556 reads: ΛΛΥΠΕΧΛΙΡΕΛΒΓΛΡΟΚΛΙΕΙΣΙΩΝ, followed by ΛΛΥΠΕ in mirror-writing.
This text corresponds to ΛΛΥΠΕ ΧΛΙΡΕ ΛΒΓΛΡ Ο ΚΛΙ ΕΙΣΙΩΝ, i.e. ἄλυπε χαῖρε, Ἀβγαρ ὁ καὶ Εἰσίων, followed by the word ἄλυπε again, in mirror writing. The text at the bottom of your photo no. 0532 is the first part of the same text again: ΛΥΠΕΧΛΙΡΕΛΒΓ, i.e. [ἄ]λυπε χαῖρε, Ἀβγ…
The text was incised by someone who did not know the Greek language, since he does not distinguish between the letters lambda and alpha: both are simply represented, in each of the texts, by the shape Λ. The text literally means 'without grief, farewell! Abgar also known as Eision'. This text, in isolation, is meaningless.
The original News article at the BBC here.
Peter Thonemann on the Lead Codices refutation here.
March 31, 2011
Bronx Zoo's missing cobra 'speaks out' on Twitter
BBC NEWS: "A tongue-in-cheek Twitter user giving "updates" on a missing deadly Egyptian cobra now has some 154,000 followers.
The 20in (50cm) venomous snake escaped from New York City's Bronx Zoo on Friday, and is yet to be found.
In one tweet, BronxZoosCobra says: "On top of the Empire State Building! All the people look like little mice down there. Delicious little mice."
In its Twitter account, The Bronx Zoo – which has some 8,000 followers – admits it is currently "the snake's game".
The identity of the person behind BronxZoosCobra's tweets has not been revealed.
Citing the animals from the animated movie Madagascar as inspiration, the "snake" claims to be a huge fan of Tina Fey, but is not so keen on Donald Trump or those who work on Wall Street.
Listing location as "Not at the Bronx Zoo", it has "visited" tourist attractions including the High Line, the museum of Natural History and Ray's Pizza.
One of the more recent posts played on New Yorkers' fears of the scaly escapee.
"It's getting pretty cold out. I think it's probably time to crash. Oh look, an apartment window someone left open just a crack. Perfect!"
Zoo officials said on Monday they were confident the adolescent Egyptian cobra was hiding in a non-public area of the Reptile House but conceded that finding it would be difficult.
The zoo closed the reptile house "until further notice"."
Via BBC News
March 30, 2011
Is all of human knowledge on the internet?
DISCOVERY NEWS: "Like a nerdier Nostradamus, H.G. Wells practically predicted the Internet in his 1937 essay "World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia."
In it, Wells describes this futuristic encyclopedia (made possible in his mind by revolutionary microfilm) as a "world organ to 'pull the mind of the world together,' which will be not so much a rival to the universities, as a supplementary and coordinating addition to their educational activities — on a planetary scale."
And in many ways, Wells' vision has been realized by the Internet. Digital archives scattered among servers around the world house innumerable books, documents, records, photographs and films that collectively represent an outpouring of human knowledge.
"That (H.G. Wells) essay collection is utopian, but really, if you look at what we're all trying to do, this idea of a permanent world encyclopedia that he has, it's really a template for what's happening," said Paul Jones, director of the Ibiblio.org digital archive and associate professor of information science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
"The real question is can that ever be accomplished, and the answer is 'no' — but why not try?" Jones told Discovery News.
For the past 18 years, Jones and others working with Ibiblio have been digitally preserving collections as well as "vernacular work," which are freely accessible works in the public domain. A well-known example of vernacular work is the collection of songs composed by Roger McGuinn, former leader of The Byrds, which he's published under a Creative Commons shared licensing agreement.
Although establishing digital libraries depends on server space, real tug-of-war over how many knowledge works (books, recordings, other documents) will end up accessible online happens between librarians and lawyers.
Why? One word: copyright.
"One of the primary roadblocks (to expanding digital libraries) is copyright," said Maura Marx, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and lead organizer of its Digital Public Library of America initiative. "Its one-size-fits-all nature locks up all works as if they will remain commercially viable for extended periods of time. Not everything is "Harry Potter" — there is no provision, for example, for circulation of scholarly works after an initial period of commercial distribution, or for any other deviation from locking things up for life, plus 70 years.""
Read more at Discovery News (Thanks Annette M)
March 29, 2011
Tour so far
Well. Here we are. Thank you and hello and yes. About a million years ago, (when there were pirates and dinosaurs, as a friend's young son cutely pointed out the other day) we opened in Brighton. Madly and with great delight. I switched off Twitter, missed a funeral I desperately wanted to attend, and set about trying to get the show ready for the first preview night. Weeks of exciting 7am – 1am work days and increasingly intense rehearsal spiralled blindly towards the first moment when I would step out and try, for the first time with real people, a show that cannot begin to work without real people taking part.
The first preview was a relief: it always is to receive a lovely reaction and a standing ovation to material that has never been performed before. Nonetheless there was much to change and reconsider, and material was dropped, swapped and kicked into better shape. Polly Findlay, my new director, is a complete poppet and a huge delight. Some of the team is new too: Iain and Jen are not with us this year and have been replaced by a couple of new, brilliant, lovely chaps. It's a happy bunch, which is very important to me.
Brighton previews over, we opened the official tour in Woking. Now it was time for the show to really get up to speed and find its pace. There's a tendency, as I don't work from a tight script, for parts to get fleshed out inadvertently and for the energy of the whole thing to sap. Over this week and the next, In Liverpool, over twenty minutes got added to the show for no reason other than me letting parts sag here and there as I became more comfortable with it. Since then I have done some important reign-pulling and tightened it again. We had some technical difficulties in Woking, and learnt a few valuable lessons, and then heaved ourselves to Liverpool for a week with that most bustling, fun, splendid of audiences. Another brilliant in-house crew looked after us: we've been really spoilt so far with excellent theatre teams. It's a big, heavy set this year to get in. The early shows packed into the back of a van: now we have two juggernauts to house all of our walloping nonsense.
Liverpool was great: the audiences and volunteers a real treat. We finished Liverpool on the Saturday and had to set up in Grimsby auditorium for the Sunday, something which turned out to be beyond our capabilities. At the time we would normally let in the audience, the crew were still building the set. It was ninety minutes late that we opened the house, to, I must say, a remarkably friendly crowd. The venue is a multiple-purpose hall and like many of those venues, you can't hear the audience from the stage. So I came out fearing that we'd lost everyone's goodwill, and then trotted through the opening routine to what sounded like four people barely paying attention. It took me a while to trust that people might actually be enjoying themselves. Meanwhile, the desire to make up on lost time helped me knock the pace of the show back into place.
Everything that could have gone wrong the afternoon of that show found its way to spectacularly fail. In a theatre, a huge rig is lowered to the stage and all our lights and headers and things we need to hang are hung accordingly. A hall like Grimsby Auditorium does its utmost to accommodate, but has no such rig: therefore everything has to be hoisted with motors. We broke both of their motors. One of our drivers had got waylaid on the way to the venue through no fault of his own and everything turned up late. The day was one of horrific turmoil. It was only due to the dedication of a profoundly patient, skilled and tireless in-house crew that the show went up at all.
The second night at Grimsby was, of course, super-smooth in comparison. But then the show had to be taken down and packed into those trucks. It was only a two-night run (most are a week or more). Jonas, our sensationally loveable sound and lighting guy, stayed on until the end, which happened at 4 am. He was then up at 7.30 to head down to Southend where we play tonight. Another colossal challenge for everyone involved. Apart from me. The Star. I get to nap and write up my blog…
There has been time for fun. In Liverpool I caught up with my A Level teacher from Whitgift, who is now Headmaster of Birkenhead School. And what a school, and what a headmaster. I went in to be interviewed as part of their quite excellent series of sixth-form lectures – and am sure I dropped the standard having had nothing prepared. Two top prefects – Josh and Tash – kicked off the questions and the whole thing, for me at least, was a pleasure. Afterwards the prefect team of Josh, Tash, Ed and Tom showed me around the beautiful campus. Not for the first time in recent years, I was bowled over by how much nicer pupils are now than when I ranked rather scrawnily amongst their number. How trite it is to complain about the youth of today being such and such and so and so. It's the automatic, mindless cry of every older generation seeing a landscape of language and culture shift beneath its feet. Kids are without doubt getting nicer. There wasn't a hint of the snickering shittiness of the class of '89. I felt like I was meeting university students: already matured, comfortable in themselves, open, tactile, utterly charming. We were NEVER like that. And I have seen this at several schools, although I have no doubt that the residency of John Clark as Head is part of the formula for this school's particular brand of delightfulness. As a Modern Languages teacher he was always brilliant, bright and effortlessly popular. As a Head he is hands-on, knows all his wards by name and interests, is every bit as popular, and motivated by a deep affection and pastoral urge that I found quite moving. Thank you everyone at the school for making the day such a treat for me.
From the sublime, to parrots and monkeys. Yesterday I went to visit the National Parrot Sanctuary and Zoo in Friskney, near Skegness. I am, as you may know, their Patron Saint. The big news is that they have expanded into monkeys. Any lingering stresses of Grimsby's first night were lifted the second our shoulders were occupied by huge, friendly Macaws or glorious lemurs. All these animals are rescued, and populate the largest sanctuary of its kind on the planet. Or maybe Europe. I should check. Steve, who runs it without a break, is the greatest expert on parrots in the country – maybe Europe or the universe – and still, after twenty years of running the place, is fuelled by the most contagious passion for understanding the creatures. To listen to his stories is such a pleasure: how one night he sat outside with a glass of wine while a lone African Grey pierced the moonlight with an aria from some previous owner's favourite opera; how he stood in an aviary and made repetitive clucking noises as part of a test to see how quickly a new sound would be picked up and disseminated amongst the bird community, only to be greeted with an extended stony silence followed by a single 'Shut the fuck up' from the ranks of anonymous Greys.
Coops and I were allowed into the lemur house with a dish of raisins. How extraordinary it is to have a creature with opposable thumbs feed from your hand. They don't grab the bounty from your palm as expected: these glorious, friendly, spirit-lifting bundles of highly attentive fluffiness reach out and grab your wrist and pull your hand closer, and don't let go until they're done.
Delights and wonders. Do go see the zoo if you're anywhere near that part of the world. Unlike any other zoo, where the animals pace or lie bored in a corner, here you walk past and through aviaries where the inhabitants flock to you and beg your attention with a thousand sweet hellos. You leave soaring: every bit as daft and weightless as they are.
March 28, 2011
Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity
DAILY MAIL: "A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics.
Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 – higher than Albert Einstein – and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role. The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours.
And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet – his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'. His mother, not sure if her child was talking nonsense or genius, sent a video of his theory to the renowned Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University. According to the Indiana Star, Institute astrophysics professor Scott Tremaine -himself a world renowned expert – confirmed the authenticity of Jake's theory.
In an email to the family, Tremaine wrote: 'I'm impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far. 'The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics. 'Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.'"
Read more at The Daily Mail (Thanks Rob)
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