Skepticblog

The past week or so has seen yet another wave of terrible, terrible reporting in the science media about the Amelia Earhart non-story. We’ve had it a lot this year, ever since TIGHAR — the organization of crank Earhart researcher Ric Gillespie — obtained financing to repeat the Earhart treasure hunt he’s done so many times before for a Discovery Communications TV crew. Gillespie’s completely implausible belief is that Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan did not crash where history tells us they did in 1937 (off of Howland island), but instead went to Nikumaroro island 650km away where they lived as castaways.

(I’m not going to repeat the details of how we know what we know, and why we can be assured that TIGHAR’s conjecture is bunk, because I’ve already done so in other writings. See the complete Skeptoid episode here, and a follow up blog post here, for the supporting background of my fundamental assumption for this article.)

Predictably, the expedition found nothing. This must have been a huge disappointment for a lot of people, since it got so much attention, even garnering encouraging comments from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and noted ocean explorer Bob Ballard. The unfortunate part is that if any of the parties who paid the reported $2.2 million cost of Gillespie’s expedition had done even a minimum amount of due diligence, they’d have discovered the same thing I stated in my Skeptoid podcast episode:

TIGHAR’s is a fringe theory supported by poor evidence and that has almost no serious support from mainstream historians or archaeologists. (continue reading…)

Most people get the right answer to the toothpaste puzzle, but it never ceases to surprise me how many get it wrong, and even staunchly argue their position. I’ve even seen it tested by taking a tube of toothpaste to the bottom of a swimming pool.

The question: What would happen if you took a tube of toothpaste to the bottom of the sea, and then opened it? It’s a great party question. Try it sometime. (continue reading…)

So goes the old saying, anyway. Shira Lazar and I found that out the hard way, when director Ryan Johnson turned us into test dummies. The idea for this pilot series episode was to see if binaural beats — audio files that purport to change your brain function — work as advertised.

Shira tested a binaural beat file that says it will make you drunk, while I did the real thing. I went into the hotel bar and got hammered with 9 drinks of Patron 1800 tequila, while Shira repaired to the hotel spa for some hot tub soaking with her iPod. We did before and after tests at the local Boomers amusement park – testing miniature golf skills, climbing, go karts, and batting cages. We did it sober, and drunk. Did the binaural beats affect Shira’s performance as much as it did mine? Watch to find out. (continue reading…)

SkepticBlog correspondents received multiple copies of a troubling email that was sent en masse to students and staff at Singularity University in the San Francisco bay area. Singularity University is a private institution that offers courses on emerging technologies to people. It’s an unconventional company, with an unconventional staff: most of its programs are headed by true, established leaders in their field; but with a founding staff who are, in part, dedicated to certain ideas, some of which have yet to persuade the mainstream of current science. Chief among these is the idea of the “singularity” — that moment when scientific advancement passes a tipping point making virtually anything possible and turning society on its head. Most notably, co-founder Ray Kurzweil believes the singularity will allow him to live forever.

Recently, following a class, student Federico Pistono sent out the following email (his name has already been made public by the staff at SU):

(continue reading…)

Kepler orbiting observatory

Last weekend I had the great fortune to attend SETIcon II, probably the world’s foremost conference on space exploration. I met more astronauts than you can shake a stick at, top aerospace journalists, space entrepreneurs, astrobiologists and exobiologists doing cutting edge stuff, got all the latest news from the Kepler planet-finding satellite, slapped five with Bill Nye and Robert Picardo, and find out straight from the horse’s mouth what’s coming up next from the private sector that’s about to put people into orbit and onto Mars faster than any government space program. It was rocking. The panelists were terrific, and every single one of them had something new to share.

My overall impression of the conference? SETI has a branding problem. (continue reading…)

Today’s email inbox produced a wonderful little press release:

Positive Results for HomeoPet’s Storm Stress Presented at AVMA Conference in St. Louis

Westhampton Beach, NY – June 8th, 2012 – Dr. Kirsti Seskal, an internationally recognized triple boarded behaviorist, presented the results of her 2 year study on HomeoPet’s Storm Stress at the AVMA conference in St. Louis. Dr. Seskal’s study shows that Storm Stress, a 100% natural pet remedy alleviates fear and anxiety in pets during thunderstorms. Storm Stress achieved statistical significance over the placebo in two reporting periods, proving a very high safety margin with no adverse events reported during the two year study.

In other data collected over 5 years and reviewed by Dr. Seskal pet owners reported a 97% rate of improvement in pets treated for veterinary and grooming visits, being left home alone and general anxiety problems.

40% of dogs in the USA suffer from storm phobias, Storm Stress is a fast acting, non-sedating liquid remedy that promotes a sense of calm in pets with weather and noise related phobias.

Quote from Daniel Farrington:

“Established in 1994, HomeoPet has become the leading source for advanced natural stress products in the veterinary field, with products sold in thousands of veterinary clinics and stores in the US and Canada, and is now available in 8 countries around the world.”

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Lots of sciencey sounding language, and clearly positive results. But let’s take a closer look and break this down bit by bit: (continue reading…)

Anyone who’s done a significant amount of research on their own into various tales of the paranormal and the pseudoscientific knows that the same names come up again and again. The reason is pretty simple; just as those of us who do skeptical research leave our fingerprints over numerous blogs and articles on different topics, so do those who do, well, the “other kind” of research.

But occasionally we get surprised. This has happened to me a few times: I find one person who has done what I considered to be excellent science-based research on a topic, and I cite him as one of my experts; then, later, while working on a completely different topic, his name comes up as something of a crank. I still consider myself a newbie in a lot of these topics. I’ve only been doing it for about six years, so many names I run across are new to me but may be old hat to you. (continue reading…)

Appealing to the target demographic

Bigfoot and aliens — groooan — are so outdated. Right?

Yes and no. They’re outdated, so far as the amount of work left to do to educate the general public; almost nobody takes them seriously anymore. But they’re not at all outdated as far as being in the public consciousness. Almost everyone knows about them, and that’s critical to the mission of science education.

To make headway in critical thinking, we need to start with common ground from which it’s easy to see the reasons why a given subject is unscientific. It’s easy to talk about Bigfoot with almost anyone and have them agree to the low value of anecdotes, logical red flags, and (thanks to the current TV show) the unreliability of ideologically motivated proponents. (continue reading…)

In February of this year, there was another round of media sensationalism when it was reported that a number of popular brands of lipstick contain potentially dangerous levels of lead. This is not a new claim; it has popped up a number of times, including during the 1990s and again in 2007.

It is, of course, true that many lipsticks do contain lead. It’s an effective component of some color additives, and is used at levels that are well below safety margins. Most mainstream media reported this accurately, such as this article from the Washington Post, but gave a voice to self-described watchdog groups such as the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics who put out this report claiming that there is “no safe level of lead exposure” and mischaracterizing the lead content in lipstick as “contamination”. Some alternative media and chain emails even got the science more wrong than that, stating that the lead is a cancer risk. (The practical danger from lead poisoning is as a neurotoxin, not a carcinogen.) Snopes effectively debunked those reports. (continue reading…)

Photo:Trounce/Wikimedia Commons

One disadvantage of living in a country stuck using non-metric measuring systems is that we’re also stuck using a few related measures. One of the most familiar of these is mpg, miles per gallon. Many other countries use a newer standard, l/100km, liters per 100 kilometers. The salient difference between the two is not merely that one is metric and the other is not; it’s that they are multiplicatively inverted from one another. One gives fuel per distance, while the other gives distance per fuel. (continue reading…)