Derren Brown's Blog, page 57

Light can generate lift

"Light has been put to work generating the same force that makes airplanes fly, a study appearing online December 5 in Nature Photonics shows. With the right design, a uniform stream of light has pushed tiny objects in much the same way that an airplane wing hoists a 747 off the ground.

Researchers have known for a long time that blasting an object with light can push the object away. That's the idea behind solar sails, which harness radiation for propulsion in space, for instance. "The ability of light to push on something is known," says study coauthor Grover Swartzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

Light's new trick is fancier than a boring push: It created the more complicated force called lift, evident when a flow in one direction moves an object perpendicularly. Airfoils generate lift; as an engine propels a plane forward, its cambered wings cause it to rise.

Lightfoils aren't about to keep an Airbus aloft for the time it takes to fly from JFK to LAX. But arrays of the tiny devices might be used to power micromachines, transport tiny particles or even enable better steering methods on solar sails.

Optical lift is "a really neat idea," says physicist Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, but it's too early to say how the effect might be harnessed. "Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. Time will tell.""

Read more at Science News (Thanks Shaun H)

Professor Surgically Installs Camera In Head, Starts Tracking the World Behind Him

"The New York University professor who planned to implant a camera in his head has finally done it.

About a week ago, Wafaa Bilal had a tattoo artist implant a titanium disc on the back of his head, so he can magnetically attach a small surveillance camera. He even set the whole procedure to music — check out this clip from CNN."

Read more at PopSci (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Magicians, it seems, have an advantage over neuroscientists

"There is a place for magic in science. Five years ago, on a trip to Las Vegas, neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde realized that a partnership was in order with a profession that has an older and more intuitive understanding of how the human brain works. Magicians, it seems, have an advantage over neuroscientists.

"Scientists have only studied cognitive illusions for a few decades. Magicians have studied them for hundreds, if not thousands, of years," Martinez-Conde told the audience during a recent presentation here at the New York Academy of Sciences. [Video: Your Brain on Magic]

She and Macknik, her husband, use illusions as a tool to study how the brain works. Illusions are revealing, because they separate perception from reality. Magicians take advantage of how our nervous systems — our eyes, sense of touch, minds and so on — are wired to create seemingly impossible illusions.

After their epiphany in Las Vegas, where they were preparing for a conference on consciousness, the duo, who both direct laboratories at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, teamed up with magicians to learn just how they harness the foibles of our brains. Their discoveries are detailed in their new book, "Sleight of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" (Henry Holt and Company, 2010).

The psychological concepts behind illusions are generally better understood, but they treat the brain as something of a black box, without the insight into brain activity or anatomy that neuroscience can offer, they write."

Read more at Live Science

New Psychology Theory Enables Computers to Mimic Human Creativity

"A dealer in antique coins gets an offer to buy a beautiful bronze coin. The coin has an emperor's head on one side and the date "544 B.C." stamped on the other. The dealer examines the coin, but instead of buying it, he calls the police. Why?

Solving this "insight problem" requires creativity, a skill at which humans excel (the coin is a fake — "B.C." and Arabic numerals did not exist at the time) and computers do not. Now, a new explanation of how humans solve problems creatively — including the mathematical formulations for facilitating the incorporation of the theory in artificial intelligence programs — provides a roadmap to building systems that perform like humans at the task.

Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor of cognitive science, said the new "Explicit-Implicit Interaction Theory," recently introduced in an article in Psychological Review, could be used for future artificial intelligence.

"As a psychological theory, this theory pushes forward the field of research on creative problem solving and offers an explanation of the human mind and how we solve problems creatively," Sun said. "But this model can also be used as the basis for creating future artificial intelligence programs that are good at solving problems creatively.""

Read more at Science Daily (Thanks Stephen)

WikiLeaks: new diplomatic cables contain UFO details, Julian Assange says

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Assange said there were some references to extraterrestrial life in yet-to-be-published confidential files obtained from the American government. He did not disclose what information was contained in the diplomatic memos obtained by the whistleblowing website. It also remains unclear when they will be published.

Mr Assange said his website, under considerable strain in recent days over its "Cablegate" series of leaks, received emails from "weirdos" claiming to have seen UFOs.

Mr Assange's comments were made during a webchat with The Guardian, during which he confirmed his team were taking security precautions due to "threats against our lives".

Full article at Telegraph

Science: A Challenge to TV Orthodoxy – Brian Cox

The put-him-in-your-pocket-and-take-him-home Professor Brian Cox uses this year's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to address the main challenges in bringing science to television. His speech addresses the problems that he faced in his own series for momentarily dismissing astrology and Dr Ben Goldacre's treatment in the press around the MMR vaccines. He also visits the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle which Cox describes as "factually total bollocks" even though he defends the right of the makers to broadcast it.

Via AMB

NLP – fact or fiction

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NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming – is a psychological approach originally developed in 1970s California by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It was radically different from mainstream therapies of the time, offering its users fast results instead of the years of commitment required for psychoanalysis. But for all its commercial success and numerous devotees, NLP is seen by its critics as just another pseudo-science without robust evidence to support its claims. So does NLP genuinely help with powerful behavioural change, or can its achievements be explained by the placebo effect?

We get literally hundreds of emails a year from "master NLP practitioners" making various claims and requests. They want to know if they can study with Derren, learn to "reach a higher level of NLP understanding" in order to recreate his effects through a greater knowledge of refined techniques. We refuse them all.

The fact is DB doesn't use NLP in his act despite the claims of other people, his unique combination of trickery and conjuring is deeply routed in psychology, illusion and even sleight of hand. They are mostly self taught techniques, reproduced  in the interest of entertainment and illusion and have not been handed down via expensive week long courses in Florida. If your forced to question reality, confused and amazed or feel that your thought pattern has been somehow controlled and you are unaware how – then he has succeeded and that's as far as it goes.

NLP takes a step further by recreating similar, albeit less impressive, effects and makes actual claims of heightened psychological wellbeing , rapid mental recovery and phobia control re-patterning (many of these are trademarked so they may disappear).

Some hardcore psychologists claim NLP is entirely placebo, it should be dismissed as cleverly constructed psychobabble in order to temporality influence you right up until the cheque arrives. However there's another group of social scientist that claim it at least holds some weight – not hard evidence, but at least some weight that delivers results and once combined with traditional methods could be the future of psychology and mental health.

William Little, journalist and author of The Psychic Tourist, finds out for himself what it's like to experience NLP techniques, meets those who have used it to change their lives and interviews its co-founder Richard Bandler, the charismatic exponent of so-called "persuasion engineering".

Available here until the 6th Dec 2010

NASA Finds New Life

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"NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It's capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

NASA is saying that this is "life as we do not know it". The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

That was true until today. In a surprising revelation, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks. Arsenic is an element poisonous to every other living creature in the planet except for a few specialized microscopic creatures.

According to Wolfe Simon, they knew that "some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new—building parts of itself out of arsenic." The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth. Like NASA's Ed Weiler says: "The definition of life has just expanded.""

Read more at Gizmodo (Thanks @HorzaGobachul)

Man eats nothing but potatoes for two months

"Chris Voight, executive director of the Washington Potato Commission, set himself the task of cutting out all other foodstuffs for 60 days to prove the nutritional value of the starchy vegetable. His challenge was an attempt to prove to the US Government that the potato should remain a part of the school lunch programme, amid claims from the US Institute of Medicine that it should be replaced by other vegetables. For 60 days, the 45-year-old denied himself all foods except potatoes, seasoning such as salt and pepper, and a little oil to cook them in.

As he ended his trial at midnight on Monday, Mr Voight, denied that the experiment had damaged his health, claiming it had helped him lose 21 pounds and lower his cholesterol. He told the Today programme: "I absolutely feel great. I've always had lots of good energy on this diet, I've had no strange side effects, I sleep well at night. I just had my last medical exam today and it came back fabulous." Such a diet may be enough to put most people off potatoes for life, but in his interview, recorded hours before the end of his diet, Mr Voight said the experience hadn't deterred him in the slightest. He said: "Actually I plan on eating potatoes tomorrow, it's just I'm planning on putting something on them and eating something with them, not just potatoes any more. "I want some salsa on some nice beef tacos with some grilled potatoes and maybe some ice cream and some milk."

The only negative health impact Mr Voight would admit to suffering during his potato marathon was a deficiency in some fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamins A and E, but he added: "Luckily I was a little overweight so there was a natural store of a lot of those in me already." He accepted, however, that eating nothing but potatoes was not a "sustainable diet"."

Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Johnny5)

Weatherwatch: Snowflakes

"The first snowflakes of the season have arrived for many of us, and what beauties they are. Back in 1611 Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, tore himself away from the stars for a while and admired snowflakes instead, noticing that almost every snowflake had six sides. He postulated that this was because it was the most efficient way for frozen moisture to pack together.

Despite not knowing about the existence of atoms and molecules, Kepler was thinking along the right lines. We now know that water molecules determine the shape of a snowflake, with the oxygen atoms usually arranging themselves in hexagonal layers. The average snowflake contains as many as 180bn molecules of water.

But not every snowflake has six sides. Thanks to "Snowflake Bentley" (Wilson A Bentley), who lived in Vermont in the US at the turn of the 19th century, we know that snowflakes can take on many shapes. He was the first to photograph a single snowflake crystal, and in his lifetime he took over 5,000 photos of snowflakes, categorising them into 80 types, including needles, columns and a wide variety of hexagonal forms.

As a result of his work, meteorologists were able to show that shape is determined by the weather conditions inside the cloud. Six pointed star snowflakes tend to form in the upper part of clouds, where temperatures are coldest. Lower in the cloud, where it is warmer, columns, needles and hexagonal plates can form too."

Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @incognitoDBer)