Derren Brown's Blog, page 76

Budget cuts force CERN to shut accelerators for year

"Europe's particle research center CERN unveiled budget cuts Friday that will force it to temporarily close its accelerators for a year in 2012, but said its flagship "Big Bang" machine will mainly be unaffected.

Announcing the trimmed-down budget, in which governments will provide 135 million Swiss francs ($133.4 million) less over a five-year period to 2015, CERN said its high-profile drive to study the origins of the cosmos would continue as planned.

It said it would delay upgrades to the...

Speak, Memory: Language and the Brain

"In the field of neuroscience, we know far less about language than about other brain mechanisms like emotion, memory, or sensation. The inherent difficulty of studying language is that it is so closely linked to thought. There are certainly parts of the brain in which language is concentrated, but it is hard to differentiate these areas from those involved in non-language cognitive processes. Language areas also appear to be quite fluid, occupying different parts of the brain among...

First Habitable Exoplanet Could Be Discovered by May

"A new mathematical analysis predicts the first truly habitable exoplanet will show itself by early May 2011.

Well, more or less. "There is some wiggle room," said Samuel Arbesman of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, lead author of a new paper posted online and to be published in PLoS ONE Oct. 4. His calculations predict a 50 percent probability that the first habitable exoplanet will be discovered in May 2011, a 66 percent chance by the end of 2013 and 75 percent chance b...

'Confessions of a Conjuror'

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It has been a pleasant day. After a private, and unusually delightful, gig in Stockholm, I gave myself and my extensive team of Coops (PA) and Iain (writing partner) the day off and painted. I have been painting a friend, the free-runner and general embodiment of all that is astonishing Chase Armitage (yes, a par-court giant called Chase: living proof of the maxim that after years of primary-school teasing and slow-burn comfortable associations, people tend to be attracted to careers which...

20,000 protest over Pope Benedict XVI's visit

Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in central London on Saturday with banners and blown-up condoms, angered at the Pope's response to the child abuse scandal, his homophobic comments about gay relationships and his claims that condoms spread rather than prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS.

Organisers believe that up to 20,000 activists took part in the demonstration in Hyde Park. Protesters included the author of 'The God Delusion', Richard Dawkings, and gay human rights campaigner Peter ...

Tour 2011 – Svengali

As many of you have heard via our mailing list, there are tour dates slowly appearing for next year.

The following venues currently have tickets available:

Stoke Tickets are on sale HERE

Woking Tickets are on sale HERE

Please don't worry if you haven't received the email yet, it can take a while to get to the thousands of people signed up!

We will announce any further dates as soon as we have details.

UPDATE: The following Dates also go on sale Monday 20th Sept

Liverpool

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting

"This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous 'glowing rectangles' that inhabit the world.

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation."

Via Vimeo

False memories: Did you lock the door or just imagine it?

"Psychological research has shown various ways "false memories" are created, such as through the power of suggestion or through vivid imagination. Now scientists studying imagination have found that people who watched a video of someone else doing a simple action often didn't remember and thought they had done it themselves when asked about it two weeks later. "This is a completely new type of false memory," says Gerald Echterhoff, a psychology professor at the University of Muenster in...

Intel's Context-Aware Computing Will Let Your Smartphone Sense Your Mood

"Through its various technological bells and whistles and the apps that you're constantly updating with what you're doing there, your smartphone already knows a lot about you. But don't you wish your phone knew you a little more, you know, intimately? Intel's chief technology guru says it will, and soon. The company is working up ways to help phones connect with users on an emotional level, sensing moods and feelings and reacting accordingly.

How will your phone climb out of your pocket and...

Meet Benjaman Kyle: The Man With No Identity

"Imagine for a moment that from this day forward you will have no memory of who you are, where you're from or the identities of any of your loved ones. It's a scary thing to contemplate, but for one man in Savannah, Ga., that harsh scenario is all too real.

Meet Benjaman Kyle, a 60-something man who can remember what he had for dinner last week but has no recollection of his parents or the high school from which he presumably graduated.

"It's like having something on the tip of your tongue...