Derren Brown's Blog, page 82

U.K. Office Workers 'Addicted' to Paper

"A survey of 1,000 U.K. office workers has found that efforts to make office paper use more efficient are proceeding sluggishly at best, wasting huge amounts of resources and stymieing IT managers' attempts to rein in energy and paper use. The survey, conducted by research firm Loudhouse on behalf of Kyocera, found that the average employee uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year, and as many as 6,800 of those sheets are wasted.

On top of piles of unneeded print jobs, the survey found employees f...

Recycled Chewing Gum Turned Into Chewing Gum Bins

"Tired of gum-plastered streets, Anna Bullus decided to design and install chewing gum receptacles made, naturally, from recycled chewing gum. Her pink "Gumdrops" now appear in five UK locations and Six Flags Theme Park in New Jersey.

Though she won't reveal the gum rubber's exact contents, Bullus told The Guardian that eight months in a lab allowed her to perfect her technique, making gum first into a foam and then a used-gum pellet, before extracting a polymer modestly called BRGP (Bullus...

Bible gets Twitter makeover

"In the beginning was the word. And then came 140 words. And at the rate that Twitter versions of the Bible are developing, there could be more than 140,000 words in the next few months.

Rivalling the speed of Creation, as described in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, tweeting the holy book has spread rapidly across the internet since the Guardian highlighted a Durham evangelist's daily version last week.

News of Chris Juby's almighty precis of scripture's 800,000-odd words to...

Hair Follicles Track the Body's Clock

"Those red-eye flights and all nighters may be leaving their mark in your hair. Researchers have found that hair follicles contain a signature of the 24-hour circadian clock that sets our sleeping habits. The method could one day help track patients with sleep disorders and help evaluate health problems in late-night shift workers.

At one point, researchers thought that the circadian clock was located solely in the brain. But after scientists discovered human circadian clock genes in the late ...

Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens

"A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland...

Young People Identify With an Online Community Almost as Strongly as With Their Own Family

"Teenage online community users feel part of their online community almost as much as they feel part of their own family. An international study of the users of teenage online community Habbo reveals that users identify more strongly with the online community than with their neighbourhood or offline hobby group. The study is based on a survey with 4299 respondents from United Kingdom, Spain and Japan. All three nationalities yielded similar results.

The study was authored by Dr. Vili...

London's Foursquare hotspots mapped

"A PhD student named Anil Bawa-Cavia has created some lovely visualisations of the data from location-based social network Foursquare, showing where the greatest activity in London is in a number of different categories.

Bawa-Cavia created the maps as part of his research into cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He sifted through the city's Foursquare checkins, and then broke down the results into different categories.

For example, the nightlife map ...

See a meteor shower in a minute

"Meteor showers are marvelous sights, as myriads of stargazers found out a week ago. But seeing them can sometimes be inconvenient. To get the best view, you have to go far from city lights and stay up until the wee hours of the morning. The ideal situation would be to camp out in a beautiful location like California's Joshua Tree National Park and keep your eyes open all night.

That's exactly what photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee did last week. He set up his camera in the park for two nights...

Mafia using football show to send messages to jailed bosses

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The Telegraph is making the claim that Italian gangsters are using a TV's shows text ticker to send coded messages to their jailed bosses.

The Italian programme, which is hosted by a former showgirl, allows football fans to send SMS text messages which then run along a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen when the show is being broadcast.

Anti-mafia prosecutors believe that members of organised crime gangs have caught onto the interactive feature, sending seemingly innocuous comments and...

Heliotrope: The World's First Energy Positive Solar Home

Look, up in the sky — it's a bird, it's a plane, it's the Heliotrope! The brainchild of Architect Ralph Disch, this rotating solar home was the seed for the extraordinary Sonnenschiff Solar Development and the modern solar movement in Germany. The home takes full advantage of the sun by rotating with it, allowing daylight to course though its triple-pane windows and energize its large roof-mounted solar array and solar thermal pipes. The result is one of the first zero-energy modern homes in ...