Derren Brown's Blog, page 54

The next generation of protests will be happening online

Richard Stallman of the Guardian offers up this insight in to cyber-protesting.

" The Anonymous web protests over WikiLeaks are the internet equivalent of a mass demonstration. It's a mistake to call them hacking (playful cleverness) or cracking (security breaking). The LOIC program that is being used by the group is prepackaged so no cleverness is needed to run it, and it does not break any computer's security. The protesters have not tried to take control of Amazon's website, or extract any data from MasterCard. They enter through the site's front door, and it just can't cope with the volume.

Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of "zombie" computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a "botnet" to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters' computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.

No – the proper comparison is with the crowds that descended last week on Topshop stores. They didn't break into the stores or take any goods from them, but they sure caused a nuisance for the owner, Philip Green. I wouldn't like it one bit if my store (supposing I had one) were the target of a large protest. Amazon and MasterCard don't like it either, and their clients were probably annoyed. Those who hoped to buy at Topshop on the day of the protest may have been annoyed too.

The internet cannot function if websites are frequently blocked by crowds, just as a city cannot function if its streets are constantly full by protesters. But before you advocate a crackdown on internet protests, consider what they are protesting: on the internet, users have no rights. As the WikiLeaks case has demonstrated, what we do online, we do on sufferance."

Full Article at The Guardian

How to draw snakes and rope with doodles and learn

Meet the woman who literally has no fear of anything

A 44-year-old woman who doesn't experience fear has led to the discovery of where that fright factor lives in the human brain.

Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as "SM" in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn't do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM.

The patient has a rare condition called Urbach–Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. Over the past 50 years studies have shown the amygdala plays a central role in generating fear responses in various animals from rats to monkeys.

Full article at LiveScience

Bulgarian TV reports of 8000 year old sun temple

The oldest temple of the Sun has been discovered in northwest Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa, aged at more then 8000 years, the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on December 15 2010.

The Bulgarian 'Stonehenge' is hence about 3000 years older than its illustrious English counterpart. But unlike its more renowned English cousin, the Bulgarian sun temple was not on the surface, rather it was dug out from under tons of earth and is shaped in the form of a horse shoe, the report said.

The temple was found near the village of Ohoden. According to archaeologists, the prehistoric people used the celestial facility to calculate the seasons and to determine the best times for sowing and harvest. The site was also used for rituals, offering gifts to the Sun for fertility as BNT reported.

This area of Bulgaria was previously made famous because remnants of the oldest people who lived in this part of Europe were found. Archaeologists also found dozens of clay and stone disks in the area of the temple.

"The semantics of the disks symbolise the disk of the Sun itself, which means that this is the earliest ever temple dedicated to the worship of the Sun God, discovered on our lands," archaeologist Georgi Ganetsovski told the BNT.

Discoveryonline

Interplanetary pin-ups

It may / may not be too late to order for xmas – but these fantastic pin-ups by designer / artist Ross Berens are going in my xMas stocking.

More at Turquoise

Derren Brown – Next Shows On TV

Channel 4 have just confirmed that Derren Brown Night will be on Saturday 8th Jan.

It will consist of:

9pm Derren Brown: Behind The Mischief – one hour retrospective documentary celebrating Derren Brown.

10pm Derren Brown Viewer's Choice – result of online vote to find the viewer's favourite Derren Brown special.

11.05 Derren Brown Enigma – repeat of Derren Brown Enigma theatre show which will have its first air on Thurs 6th January at 9.30pm.

The evening will be linked by specially recorded introductions from the man himself, Mr Derren Brown.

The size of your brain's visual cortex determines whether optical illusions fool you

"How we perceive the world is determined by the visual cortex, but not everybody's cortex is created equal. One person's visual cortex can be up to three times bigger than someone else's, and size matters when it comes to perception.

The primary visual cortex has a far more active role in shaping how we see the world than anyone had suspected. Researchers at University College London discovered this when they were testing a pair of optical illusions on some test subjects. Here's the first one, known as the Ebbinghaus illusion:

Which of the two circles at the center of the other circles is smaller? Most people will say the circle on the left is smaller than the circle on the right, but they're actually the exact same size."

Read more at io9 (Thanks Christopher C)

Scientists Find Clues Behind the Mystery of Amelia Earhart's Disappearance

A tiny sliver of bone found on an island off the South Pacific may finally solve the riddle of Amelia Earhart's disappearance 73 years ago.

Famed as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart vanished in a record attempt to circle the world's equator. Later declared missing and eventually dead, many believed her plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. But now historians say they have found evidence to suggest Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan may have landed the plane and survived as castaways on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the republic of Kiribati.

Many theories emerged after the disappearance of Earhart. The unresolved circumstances of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, along with her fame, attracted a great body of other claims relating to her last flight, all of which have been generally dismissed for lack of verifiable evidence. Several unsupported theories have become well known in popular culture.

Read more at News Feed

Amelia Earhart at Wikipeida

Massive Volcanism May Have Caused Biggest Extinction Ever

SAN FRANCISCO — The greatest extinction in the history of life may have been caused, in part, by ozone-depleting gases spewed in a massive volcanic eruption, a new study suggests. Geologists have found surprisingly high amounts of the elements fluorine and chlorine in Siberian lavas dating back 250 million years — when about 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species went extinct.

Benjamin Black, a graduate student at MIT, and his colleagues described their theory Dec. 13 in a poster presentation at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Researchers have long struggled to explain the "Great Dying" that occurred at the end of the Permian period. Some think that the extinction was a long, drawn-out affair caused by multiple factors — perhaps gradual changes in oceanic or atmospheric chemistry (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339). Others have blamed a single catastrophic event such as a belch of methane from the seafloor or an asteroid impact (SN: 2/24/01, p. 116) like the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago.

Full Story at Wired Science

Have we finally cured HIV? Doctors claim success

Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.

The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its 'docking station', attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.

The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.

They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, "It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient."

Full story over at Aidsmap.com