The inside story of the brain revealed at new exhibition

Brain

A major new exhibition looks at some of the great and gruesome things we have done to our grey matter over the course of human history.

Albert Einstein’s genius brain is going on display at a major new exhibition telling the remarkable story of our grey matter.

The exhibition, Brains: The Mind As Matter, looks at what we have done to our noggins over the course of human history in 150 objects, including art, manuscripts, artifacts, videos and photography.

The brain’s secrets continue to confound and inspire us, despite our attempts over the centuries to manipulate and study it.

As well as Einstein’s brain, which research shows had larger-than-normal regions for dealing with numbers, there are also specimens of the founder of computing, Charles Babbage, and serial killer William Burke.

Artworks on the theme of the brain by contemporary artists including Helen Pynor, Andrew Carnie, Annie Cattrell, Susan Aldworth, Jonathon Keats and Katharine Dowson will also be on display.

The exhibtition takes us through journey around our brains, and the emotions and ethics associated with what we do to it.

The brain contains 100 billion nerve cells and some 100 trillion synapses or neural connections. It cannot be transplanted.

The exhibition has four sections:

* Measuring / Classifying, looks at our attempts to understand the relationship between the size and shape of the brain and how it functions

* Mapping / Modelling shows how we have tried to represent the anatomy of the brain from wax models to beautiful paintings and the latest kaleidoscopic Brainbow images of nerve cells

* Cutting / Treating explores how we have drilled and dissected the brain over thousands of years from early crude attempts to complex 3D images

* Giving /Taking traces the stories of brain harvesting, from the horrors of Nazi mass murder and experimentation to the hope offered by research into neuro-degenerative disorders

Marius Kwint, guest curator, said: "Brains shows how a single, fragile organ has become the object of modern society’s most profound hopes, fears and beliefs, and some of its most extreme practices and advanced technologies.

“The different ways in which we have treated and represented real, physical brains open up a lot of questions about our collective minds.”

Ken Arnold, head of public programmes at Wellcome Collection, added: "We all recognise its outline and know that it is the most important part of us; but for many, the brain remains as mysterious as it is beguiling.

“This exhibition presents brains of extraordinary people among other intriguing specimens, and showcases remarkable tales from more than 500 years of scientific investigation into the physical matter of the mind.”

News by Mirror


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Iran releases video of downed U.S. spy drone–looking intact

Downed U.S. spy plane

Iran's Press TV on Thursday broadcast an extended video tour of the U.S. spy drone that went down in the country--and it indeed appeared to look mostly intact.

American officials have acknowledged that an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance plane was lost on a mission late last week, but have insisted that there is no evidence the drone was downed by hostile acts by Iran. Rather, they said, the drone likely went down because of a malfunction, and they implied the advanced stealth reconnaissance plane would likely have fallen from such a high altitude--the RQ-170 Sentinel can fly as high as 50,000 feet--that it wouldn't be in good shape.

But Iranian military officials have claimed since Sunday that they brought down an American spy drone that was little damaged. And now they have provided the first visual images of what looks to be a drone that at least outwardly appears to be in decent condition, in what is surely another humiliating poke in the eye for U.S. national security agencies.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the released images Thursday, a Defense Department spokesman told Yahoo News. But military analysts said it appeared to them to be the American drone in question.

"I have been doing this for thirty years, and it sure looks like" a stealthy U.S. drone to me," Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute and consultant to the RQ-170's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, told Yahoo News in a telephone interview Thursday. "I think we are going to face the high likelihood that Iran has an intact version of one of our most important intelligence gathering tools."

Still, Thompson went on, the intelligence "windfall" to Iran from obtaining the advanced U.S. stealthy drone may be mitigated.

"I don't think the Iranians get as much out of it as they might hope," he said. "It probably came into their hands as a result of a technical malfunction. What that means is they still don't have a real defense against the U.S. flying other vehicles that have similar capabilities, without much fear of interception."

Analysts also noted that the video of the drone released by Iran did not show the drone's underside. "Pretty intact," the Center for Strategic and International Studies' James Lewis said by email. "Interesting that they covered the underside."

The New York Times reported Thursday that--unsurprisingly--the RQ-170 was lost while making the latest foray over Iran during an extended CIA surveillance effort of Iran's nuclear and ballistic weapons program.

"The overflights by the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, built by Lockheed Martin and first glimpsed on an airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2009, are part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program aimed at Iran, current and former officials say," the Times' Scott Shane and David Sanger wrote. "The urgency of the effort has been underscored by a recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."

Iran in turn has complained that the drone overflights represent an act of aggression and violation of its sovereignty, and summoned the Swiss envoy--who represents U.S. interests in Iran--on Thursday to lodge a protest.

However, while the images of the U.S. drone surely allowed Iran to score another public relations blow against Washington, Iran may find it tough to generate much in the way of international sympathy for being the target of U.S. surveillance.

Last week, Iranian hardliners ransacked the British embassy in Tehran, prompting the United Kingdom to recall its diplomatic staff from Tehran and order Iran's embassy in London closed. Last month, the UN atomic watchdog agency issued a report raising concerns about research Iran is suspected by some nations to have conducted before 2003 on military aspects of its nuclear program. Iran has insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes. In October, the United States accused elements of Iran's Qods force of plotting to assassinate the Saudi envoy to the United States. The United Nations General Assembly voted last month in favor of a resolution condemning the Iranian plot.

Amid its growing international isolation, Iran, unsurprisingly, seemed intent to play up the drone incident for all it could.

"China, Russia want to inspect downed U.S. drone," proclaimed a headline from Iran's Mehr news agency Thursday.

The RQ-170 Sentinel, however, reportedly did not use the latest U.S. surveillance technology on board, in part because as a single-engine aircraft, it was thought more likely to occasionally go down.

"The basic principles of stealthy aircraft are fairly well known," Thompson said. "In terms of [the drone's] on-board electronics and information systems, it is fairly routine in combat to require authentication codes to make them hard to unlock."

News by Yahoo

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YouTube gets its biggest makeover ever

YouTube

(Mashable) -- We already knew about YouTube's redesign, which tech-savvy readers have been enabling for the past 10 days. As of now, however, the new YouTube is available to everyone.

Unlike parent company Google, which tends to roll out redesigns over a period of days, YouTube pressed the button and switched the homepage for every user worldwide at 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday.

So what's the change all about? One word: channels. The world's most popular online video service now sees itself as a descendent of cable TV, with millions of channels rather than hundreds -- and it's doing its darndest to encourage you to use it that way.

The first new thing you'll see is an "add channels" button in the top left-hand corner of the page. Under that you'll find your top 10 favorite channels, which you can "pin" to the top of the page.

"The future of the YouTube experience has channels at the center of it," says Margaret Stewart, director of User Experience at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California. "It's a container for all the world's video, and it needs to be the best home for that."

YouTube is also tweaking the colors of its logo and adding a soft gray background to the videos. In a sign that the service is becoming more integrated with its parent company -- and that more employees are going back and forth between San Bruno and the Googleplex in Mountain View -- Stewart says the redesign includes "subtle alignments with Google's visual style."

Part of that process, naturally, includes integration with the Google+ social network. But YouTube is also making it easier to post videos on Facebook and Twitter, too. And the channel change also came to YouTube apps on platforms other than the web. For example, it just became a lot easier to access YouTube channels on your Xbox.

There are four new channel templates that content creators can use, including one template designed for networks (with prominent featured content) and one for bloggers (with the most recent content first). Executives and designers at the company emphasize that this just the beginning of the redesign; more channel-focused changes and channel templates are coming soon.

Read up on the new YouTube user manual, and let us know in the comments: Has the strategy worked? Will this make you use YouTube channels more?

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VU - The FBI is playing videos of Russian spy Anna Chapman

Videos of Russian spy Anna Chapman

The FBI on Monday on its website videos, photos and documents from its investigation ten years in Anna Chapman, the glamorous Russian spy, and nine other officials expelled from Moscow in July 2010 by the United States. The first video shows the beautiful declassified spy, whose nude photos have been around the world, the table of a cafe in New York June 26, 2010 with an undercover U.S. agent. You can see the young redhead dressed in jeans and white T-shirt and wearing sunglasses, a bag out of his book and what appears to be headphones.

The other six videos show three Russian agents expelled with Anna Chapman. We see them exchange or retrieve objects and documents in the street in New York, in the bushes, in a café and a staircase with a Russian official, between May 2004 and March 2010. These eight videos have been published with hundreds of photos and documents related to this investigation a decade called "Ghost Stories". These arrests remind us that "espionage on American soil has not disappeared with the Cold War," the FBI on its website, commenting on the release of documents. "While the 'illegal' the SVR (Russian intelligence services abroad) have never got hold of classified documents, their intention was serious, extensive and funded by the SVR."

This group of ten spies had been arrested and pleaded guilty of espionage in June 2010. They were evicted two weeks later in an exchange worthy of the Cold War. The United States had given to the Moscow against four Russians, three convicted of spying for the West. On his return to Moscow, Anna Chapman chose to expose themselves in the media, contrary to the tradition of the secret services. In particular, posed scantily clad for a men's magazine and appeared in an issue of public television.

News by Lemonde


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YouTube close to announcing agreements to broadcast original programming.

YouTube

AFP - The online video site YouTube (Google Group) could announce next week agreements with various media and celebrities on the production of original programs broadcast it on "strings" theme, according to the Wall Street Journal. The daily quoted Wednesday among the partners expected the company Electus, a subsidiary of IAC internet, ShineReveille, owned by News Corporation of Rupert Murdoch and Fremantle (RTL) and the "skate legend" Tony Hawk and the creator of the series "CSI" ("CSI") Anthony Zuiker and others that broadcast their programs already on the site.

Google, which has not commented on this information, would build more than $ 100 million to turn YouTube into a new supplier of a variety of "channels" free broadcast-quality programs, financed by advertising. These channels are divided into twenty thematic categories, the kitchen, comedy or information, for example, and offer programs specifically tailored to the Web, rather than copied the model of television.

This comprehensive offering diversity of supply of YouTube, originally an exchange site amateur videos purchased by Google in 2006 to $ 1.65 billion, became owner of the spring-demand video. This activity is already the result of a collaboration between YouTube and many of the major Hollywood studios like Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. (Time Warner), Universal (GE and Comcast), Lionsgate and several independent studios.