Derren Brown's Blog, page 55

Ancient Chinese pyramids baffle scientists

No one seems to know the origin or the meaning behind a mysterious pyramid that sits atop Mount Baigong in western China that local legends claim is an alien UFO launch tower.

Nine scientists form the team that will travel to the western province of Qinghai and the mouth of this 165-198 foot tall structure known as the "ET Relics."

"The pyramid has three caves with openings shaped like triangles on its façade and is filled with red-hued pipes leading into the mountain and a nearby salt water lake," says China's state-run Xinhua agency.

The site in question with its high altitude and thin, crisp air has long been considered an ideal astronomical location. Two of the three caves at the foot of the mountain have collapsed and are inaccessible. The remaining middle one, which is the largest, stands with its floor about 6 feet above the ground and its top about 9 feet above the surface.

Inside the cave, there is s a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting from the top to the inside of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes into the earth with only its top visible above the ground. Dozens of strange pipes surround the opening with diameters ranging from 10 to 40 centimeters. Their structures indicate a highly advanced and completely unknown construction technique.

More info and pictures at Weird Asia

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers

"He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.

He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.

"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".

Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.

Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net."

Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @incognitoDBer)

Penn and Teller, on UK TV!

"ITV1 announces the prime-time commission of Penn & Teller: Fool Us. This brand new entertainment extravangza is an original and daring TV magic show – starring the world famous magic double act – Penn & Teller.

Hosted by Jonathan Ross, and produced by DCD-owned September Films/117 Production, this 90 minute spectacular throws down the gauntlet to every aspiring magician in the UK to perform their most mystifying trick to fool Penn & Teller.

Las Vegas legends Penn & Teller will have no prior knowledge of either the performers or the planned trick. They'll be sitting in the audience just like everyone else, watching every move the guest magicians make. And, if any illusionist comes on and fools the professionals – they will win a five star trip to Las Vegas to perform as the opening act in Penn & Teller's world famous show at the Rio Hotel & Casino.

Every magician will be performing for high stakes. Whether it's a grand stage illusion or a tiny trick of sleight of hand, whether it uses tigers or toothpicks, if they are good enough to fool Penn & Teller then they get to perform in Vegas with the iconic duo.

Penn says: "Nothing would give me or Teller more pleasure than to hand over Vegas tickets to someone – anyone – who has the nerve to stand in front of us, monkey with us, leave us baffled and ultimately blow us away with their brilliance. That would be a dream. We SO want that to happen! Magic is always evolving with different performers constantly innovating. We believe there are performers out there who can do it so we've sent out this challenge. And if they can fool us we're taking them to Vegas to perform!" "

Read more at ITV (Thanks @anothercraig)

Skin was the first organ to evolve

"In the evolution of organs, skin came first. The discovery that even sponges have a proto-skin shows that the separation of insides from outsides in multicellular animals was key to their evolution.

It has been known since the 1960s that sponges have a distinct outer layer of cells, or epithelium. But because sponges lack the genes involved in expelling molecules, it was assumed that this was not a functional organ. Sally Leys and her team at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, have now shown otherwise. When they grew flat sponges on thin membranes, with liquid above and below, they found that the epithelium kept some molecules out, sometimes only allowing 0.8 per cent through in 3 hours (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015040).

Sponges were the first multicellular animals to evolve, so the finding means all complex life has a skin. Leys thinks the organ was vital as it isolated animals' insides from their surroundings. As a result, cells could send chemical signals to each other without interference, setting the stage for complex organs to evolve.

Scott Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley, says the findings hint that sponges were the ancestors of other animals rather than a sister group."

Read more at New Scientist (Thanks @incognitoDBer)

Bold and Italicize Your Way to a Better Memory

"Let's say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read. What if I didn't care about the ease with which you flipped through my book, but with the amount of information you retained from it? In that case, the fourth option is actually the worst choice, according to a new study.

Attempting to reconstruct a biological taxonomy lesson, the researchers asked 28 adult volunteers to learn about the norgletti and two other kinds of aliens, each of which had seven features. The participants saw these characteristics listed in either gray, obnoxious Comic Sans MS, or gray, delicate Bodoni MT, or black, clear-as-day Arial font, and had 90 seconds to memorize the lists. They were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on their retention with questions such as What color eyes does the norgletti have?

The volunteers who learned the information in Arial answered 73 percent of the questions correctly, whereas those who read it in hard-to-read fonts had 87 percent accuracy. (There was no difference between the two annoying fonts.) The results have enormous implications for education. But would this font-switching strategy do any good in a real classroom?"

Read more at The Last Word On Nothing (Thanks Cathy)

Apple chap knocks up ancient Lego computer

"Apple software engineer Andrew Carol has rather impressively put together a replica of the ancient Antikythera Mechanism – built entirely from Lego.

The mechanism, constructed around 80BC, was recovered from the wreck of a cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901, but wasn't until 2006 revealed to be a planetary motion calculator.

Carol has, with a big bucket of Lego and the backing of Digital Science, demonstrated how the contraption may have been used to calculate eclipses:"

Via The Register (Thanks Duncan)

Winners of the Parrot Zoo Draw!

A message from the Parrot Zoo:

"I am proud to announce the winners of our spectacular Derren Brown Prize Draw, so all you guys who kindly had a go please check below to see if you have an early Christmas Bonus.

All the winners will be contacted by email early next week to confirm your postage address.

May I personally thank you all for entering the draw as every single penny raised will be going towards the care and upkeep of the many parrots and animals here at the centre.

Thank you,

Steve Nichols"

TO CHECK IF YOU'RE A WINNER CLICK HERE

Last Orders At The Store

Anyone wanting to order anything from the ART STORE or an ENIGMA poster in time for xmas will need to do so today as this is the last day available for postal orders. After this we will still be accepting orders but cannot guarantee any deliveries before xmas.

Mutual criticism is vital in science. Libel laws threaten it

"Recently we have seen a large number of fairly high-profile libel cases involving scientists and doctors, including Dr Peter Wilmshurst, Dr Henrik Thomsen, Dr Simon Singh, and my own.

In many of them, lawyers have been dismissive of any special pleading for science in the libel reform movement: if you want to step out and criticise, they explain, you should be aware of the implications and ready to defend your point. But in science, the assumptions and traditions are different, and with good reason. In science and medicine, criticising each others' ideas and practices isn't an aberration, or a special occasion: it's exactly what you are supposed to do, all of the time, and with very good reason.

Medicine is almost unique among all human activities in that it's possible to do enormous harm even when you set out with the absolute best of intentions, and there are many examples of this, even in mainstream healthcare. On paper, for example, it made perfect sense to give antiarrhythmics preventively to everyone who'd had a heart attack, rather than just the people who had abnormal hearth rhythms. But it turned out that this practice had killed more Americans than died in the whole of the Vietnam war.

In medicine, when you make a mistake about whether something works or not, it's possible to cause death and suffering on a genuinely biblical scale.

That's why we have systems to try and stop us making such mistakes, and at the heart of all these lies mutual criticism: criticising each others ideas and practices. This isn't something that's marginal, or tolerated by the profession. It's something that is welcomed and actively encouraged. More than that, it's institutionalised."

Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @incognitoDBer)

Time-lapse Video: From Birth To 10 Years Old

"A father has taken a photo of his daughter almost every day to create a classic time-lapse video."

Via Yahoo News