Derren Brown's Blog, page 72

200 New Species of Frogs, Spiders, Mammals and More Discovered

"In just two months of searching through a remote, mountainous rainforest in Papua New Guinea, scientists discovered 200 new species of animals and plants, including spiders, frogs, insects and mammals.

The surveys were done in 2009 in the Nakanai Mountains on the island of New Britain, which the country has nominated for World Heritage status. The new species could offer a boost to that effort.

"While very encouraging, these discoveries do not mean that our global biodiversity is out of the woods," Leeanne Alonso of Conservation International said in a press release Oct. 5. "On the contrary, they should serve as a cautionary message about how much we still don't know about Earth's still hidden secrets."

Some of the newly discovered species are truly spectacular, such as the pink-eyed beauty above, one of 20 leaf katydids found in the surveys.

Within the relatively small sample of 42 individuals of the leaf katydids in the Muller Range mountains, scientists Piotr Naskrecki and David Rentz found at least 20 new species.

We've got some of the most beautiful, strange and interesting of the new species in this gallery, along with a few very rare ones that hadn't been seen in the area before."

See them over at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Contest Seeks Next Crazy Invention

"Wacky products like fart-absorbing pads, inflatable bra inserts, and disposable underwear just go to show you that there really is a market out there for anything.

No one knows that better than Kim Olenicoff, founder of Solutions That Stick Inc., a Southern California-based company that has carved out a niche selling weird, offbeat products that solve common problems.

Olenicoff is the proud creator of best-selling gems like Subtle Butt – a small strip of activated carbon fabric with an antimicrobial layer that absorbs the stench of farts when placed inside underwear – and Yoobies, inflatable inserts for bras that give the girls a quick lift. Now, she is lending a helping hand to fellow innovators who want consumers to get wind of their own zany products.

Olenicoff and her crew at Solutions That Stick have just launched the I Should Have Invented That! Contest, urging aspiring inventors to submit their ideas before midnight PST on Nov. 12 at solutionsthatstick.com.

A panel of judges including retail experts will choose seven to 10 finalists and post them on Facebook.com/SolutionsThatStick for the public to vote on beginning Nov. 17.

Whichever inventor gets the most votes by Dec. 2 will win the contest and get the guidance to finally turn their idea or product into a reality — before someone else thinks of it.

Olenicoff told AOL News she'll personally help steer the winning inventor in the right direction, from helping with the design of the product to manufacturing and marketing it."

Read more at AOL News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Should psychoanalysis be in the Science Museum?

"The Science Museum has never set itself up as a gatekeeper, deciding what is science and what is not. As a museum, we have a wide-ranging interest in many forms of scientific culture. Our great collections represent diverse technologies and practices as well as research. This has been the basis of our approach to medicine since we accepted responsibility for the care of the Wellcome Collections on the History of Medicine in the 1970s.

So where does psychoanalysis fit in? With 1 in 4 people in the UK formally diagnosed with a mental illness during their lifetime, the subject of mental and emotional well-being has never been more relevant. We have therefore taken a number of major initiatives in this area.

We have a long-standing relationship with the British Psychological Society, which sponsors our curator of psychology. Our recently reopened biomedical gallery "Who Am I?" deals with neuroscience, among other things. The psychoanalysis exhibition, sponsored by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, is part of a diverse, balanced approach to the study of the mind.

Psychoanalysis has moved well beyond the work of its founder, Sigmund Freud. The exhibition takes place at a time when there are fruitful discussions between neuroscientists and psychoanalysts about the relationship between the concept of the non-conscious, as explored by the former, and the unconscious, as described by the latter.

Interest in the effectiveness of a range of treatments based on psychoanalytic concepts and methods is also very active. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shedler of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver recently reviewed a wide range of published meta-analyses of therapeutic outcomes (American Psychologist, vol 65, p 98). He concluded that empirical evidence supports the efficacy of these treatments. Psychoanalysis is also the subject of serious academic discussions within well-known departments such as the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London.

Our new exhibition aims to introduce the subject to a non-specialist audience. The focus will be on the unconscious, treated in both its therapeutic and cultural context. We aim to engage visitors through a blend of historical and modern objects, visual and audio displays and artworks by artists including Grayson Perry and Noble and Webster.

The exhibition will be a powerful experience that will prompt thought and inform discussion. We anticipate this debate will be the first of many.

Psychoanalysis: The unconscious in everyday life opens on 13 October and runs until April 2011. The museum's Dana Centre will hold an associated discussion series. For more information visit sciencemuseum.org.uk"

Read more at New Scientist (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Yavin IV reaches the edge of space

"A group of self-confessed 'nerds' have achieved something very cool – launching their own balloon to the very edge of our atmosphere.

Using an iPhone, Flip camera and an ice cooler, the Yavin IV project scored some very impressive results."

Via Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

13 Stunning Photos From 10-Year Sea Census

"Yeti Crab

Its fuzzy, winter-white coat might look at home in the Himalaya, but the yeti crab was discovered skittering around hydrothermal vents about a mile and a half (2.4 kilometers) under the South Pacific off Easter Island (map) in March 2005.

The 6-inch (15-centimeter), blind crustacean—officially Kiwa hirsuta—is among the more than 6,000 new species discovered during the Census of Marine Life, a ten-year effort to document all sea life that concluded Monday.

The project's 500-plus expeditions have also amassed a visual legacy as unique as the organisms uncovered—from which National Geographic News has selected these images as the 13 best of the census. "

See them over at National Geographic (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Anger Management for Online Trolls

"Browse through a few typical online comment threads, and the need for anger management quickly becomes clear, likely sending sane people scurrying off to more pleasant corners of the internet. Now scientists at Yahoo and their colleagues are devising ways to automatically flag inordinately irate commenters to keep them from ruining online conversations for others.

To help curb so-called trolls who spew disruptive comments as a kind of sport, researchers developed techniques for automatically identifying negative posts that are off-topic while staying away from relevant ones. But rather than banishing hostile jerks or deleting their comments, the system could someday help steer them into more productive discussions.

"We might want mechanisms where you can ask people to tone it down, or 'take it outside' to not disrupt others, or use humor to defuse situations," said cognitive scientist Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research, who presented the work Sept. 30 at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Atlanta.

Churchill and computer scientist Sara Owsley Sood of Pomona College analyzed 782,934 comments from 168,095 distinct threads from October 2009 articles on the news-story commenting site Yahoo! Buzz. To determine whether comments were on-topic or not, they first used the same techniques used by search engines to evaluate the relevance of a site to a query: The more words a comment contained that were also found in the story it was connected to, the more on-topic the comment was judged.

Next, the comments were judged as either angry, happy or sad. For example, "sucks" is linked with anger. The system learned to recognize emotions by reading LiveJournal posts, which bloggers can tag with moods such as "creative," and analyzing which word combinations were linked most with certain moods.

The algorithms fared well at catching irrelevant comments and deciphering sentiments. The researchers agreed with the angry-sad-happy judgments on comments taken at random from their data 65 to 80 percent of the time. They hope to upgrade the system by having it learn from comments they manually classify by mood."

Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)

Chief scientist who questioned evolution theory fired

"The Education Ministry's chief scientist, Dr. Gavriel Avital, was dismissed on Monday following a scandal-filled trial period of less than a year.

Sources familiar with the affair said Avital was fired over past statements he had made, in which he questioned evolution and the global warming theory.

Avital, who was named chief scientist in December 2009, said Darwinism should be analyzed critically along with biblical creationism.

"If textbooks state explicitly that human beings' origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don't believe the evolutionary account is correct," he said.

"There are those for whom evolution is a religion and are unwilling to hear about anything else. Part of my responsibility, in light of my position with the Education Ministry, is to examine textbooks and curricula,"

Avital added, "If they keep writing in textbooks that the Earth is growing warmer because of carbon dioxide emissions, I'll insist that isn't the case.""

Read more at Y Net News

The World's First Artificial Heart

"This is the world's first total artificial heart.

Surgeons Domingo Liotta and Denton Cooley placed it into Haskell Carp's chest on April 4, 1969 in Houston. They removed it 64 hours later when a donor heart became available.

But the heart did what it was supposed to do, explained Judy Chelnick, an associate curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The patient did not live long, but not because the manmade heart malfunctioned. It worked just fine, laying the stage for many later variations.

The piece of medical history is now stored in a formaldehyde solution in a cabinet behind the scenes at the museum. The NMAH had kindly invited us over to look at their patent medicine collection, and we just happened to stumble upon Chelnick going about her business.

She pulled the heart from a cabinet and set it on a cart for us to look at. "

Read more at The Atlantic

Mental muscle: six ways to boost your brain?

"Brain training games won't make you smarter – but a dose of blue light or an electrical shock just might

BREATHE in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I crack open an eye. Everyone else has theirs closed. I shut it again. Breathe in, breathe out. Around me people are sitting crossed-legged, meditating. For some it's spiritual, for others an oasis of calm. Me? I'm building a better brain.

A few months ago I would probably have bought a brain-training game, but alas, it turns out they are probably useless. Although your performance on the games improves, that effect doesn't seem to translate into the real world (see "The rise and fall of brain training"). With that in mind, I wondered if there was anything else I could do to give my grey matter a boost.

Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.

One of the most promising is music – and not via the famous but controversial "Mozart effect", whereby merely listening to classical music is supposed to improve brain performance. Learning to play an instrument brings about dramatic brain changes that not only improve musical skills but can also spill over into other cognitive abilities, including speech, language, memory, attention, IQ and even empathy. Should I dust off my trumpet and get practising?

Musical training, especially at a young age, seems to significantly alter the structure of your brain. For instance, after 15 months of piano lessons young children had more highly developed auditory and motor areas than their untrained peers. These brain areas are very active when you play an instrument "

Read more at New Scientist (Thanks XxLadyClaireXx)

Museum Intentionally Showcases Particularly Bad Art

"The world's greatest art museums have a new rival in their midst — kind of. While New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre in Paris need not lock up their treasures just yet, there is a new kid on the block. The Museum of Particularly Bad Art in Melbourne, Australia, is attempting to boost the blossoming genre of paintings in poor taste with an annual exhibition and competition spotlighting, well, particularly bad art.

Inspired by the Museum of Bad Art in Boston, Museum of Particularly Bad Art curator Helen Round said her collection was kick-started in 1996 when friends presented her with a portrait of actor Scott Baio. "Maybe you should never verbalize your dreams because someone will always make you follow them," Round joked to AOL News. Subsequently hooked on art of dubious merit, Round began to amass a personal collection of paintings and other works of art that she eventually thought deserved a wider audience. She mounted her debut exhibition in 1999 and another, more controversial, display in 2004. That year, Round used her exhibition to protest the amount of money a local street festival was spending for what she perceived as little return. "I said that for $400 I will get more attention than the $400,000 [they were spending]," Round explained. "The people I was protesting against heard and the next year they gave me funding."

An annual portrait exhibition and competition was born with art sourced from yard sales, secondhand stores and garbage piles. "You find them everywhere," said Round, who says she owns more than 600 pieces of art — a collection that could be the world's worst. "I love earnest renderings and I love a passionate, yet uneducated, hand. That is what strikes a chord for me.""

Read more at AOL News (Thanks XxLadyClaireXx)