Derren Brown's Blog, page 98
July 5, 2010
Our brains are more like birds' than we thought
"For more than a century, neuroscientists believed that the brains of humans and other mammals differed from the brains of other animals, such as birds (and so were presumably better). This belief was based, in part, upon the readily evident physical structure of the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behaviors.
A new study, however, by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of...
Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution
"Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness.
The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far. Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as...
July 4, 2010
Butterfly Effect In The Brain
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"This may not seem surprising to most of us, but it has puzzled neuroscientists for decades. Given that the brain is the most powerful computing device known, how can it perform so well even though the behaviour of its circuits is variable?
A long-standing hypothesis is that the brain's circuitry actually is reliable – and the apparently high variability is because your brain is engaged in many tasks simultaneously, which affect each other.
It is this hypothesis that the researchers at UCL...
How Old Is The Magic Circle?
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You mean you don't know? No, it doesn't count if you had to Google it.
The Magic Circle is 105 this year.
It was founded in 1905, when stage magic was incredibly popular with the theatre-going public and was initially proposed by Neil Weaver and Martin Chapender, both magicians, who felt that there was an open risk of the exposure of trade secrets.
In the wake of Chapender's untimely death at the very young age of 25 a group of amateur and professional magicians assmebled to found an...
July 3, 2010
Stephen Fry on Wagner
"Stephen Fry explores his passion for controversial composer Richard Wagner. Can he salvage the music he loves from its dark association with Hitler's Nazi regime? His journey takes him to Germany, Switzerland and Russia as he pieces together the story of the composer's turbulent career.
Along the way he plays Wagner's piano, meets the composer's descendants and eavesdrops on rehearsals for the legendary Bayreuth Festival, the annual extravaganza of Wagner's music held in a theatre designed...
2-Billion-Year-Old Fossils May Be Earliest Known Multicellular Life
"A newly discovered group of 2.1 billion-year-old fossil organisms may be the earliest known example of complex life on Earth. They could help scientists understand not just when higher life forms evolved, but why.
The fossils — flat discs almost five inches across, with scalloped edges and radial slits — were either complex colonies of single-celled organisms, or early animals. Either way, they represent an early crossing of a critical evolutionary threshold, and suggest that the crossing...
Computer program deciphers a dead language that mystified linguists
"The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.
The computer program relies on a few basic assumptions in order to make intuitive guesses about the language's structure. Most importantly, the lost language has to be closely related to a known, deciphered language, which in the case of Ugaritic is Hebrew. Second, the alphabets...
Happy Birthday Coops!
It's young Coops Birthday and this time instead of flooding his email – you shuold follow him on @lordcoopy and say a Happy 13th Birthday to him yourself.
July 1, 2010
All New Derren Brown website launched tomorrow, sometime.
Yes you read it right and it's only taken us a whole friggin year. Lots of pushing back and forth between TV companies, managers, copyright lawyers, human rights groups, gay activists, animal welfare research scientists and an army of Puerto Rican immigration officials has laboured the slow task of amassing all the content and arranging it in a format suitable for your new iPad, HTC phone or Commodore 64. Well now it's ready.
There's a stack of new content and stuff to browse – we'll also be a...
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