bad science

Ben “Badscience” Goldacre gets stuck into Patrick Holford’s rampant quackery like a big hot meal: Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it. The eight copper pads do…

Read More leaves the bowl sparkling clean continuously

The Independent appears to have repented of its indulgence of Martin Durkan’s quackery, publishing a report on various scientists usually considered to be “climate sceptics” whose work Durkan misrepresented or even falsified. Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in…

Read More The Indy takes a holiday in sane

So last week’s mobile-phones-kill-bees screamer front page was bad enough. They ignored all the countervailing evidence and picked out a tiny uncontrolled study carried out in someone’s spare time that neither mentioned the condition they were interested in, nor even attempted to measure how much RF energy they were using. This Sunday, they were at…

Read More The National Inquirer, now fortified with Patrick Cockburn

The Sindy has been getting a lot of blogosphere points for this article, which alleges that a mysterious ailment of bees is caused by “radiation” from mobile phone networks. Nowhere is it mentioned that an identical, and unexplained, condition has been documented as early as 1896, before the invention of radio and a hell of…

Read More The Rays from Outer Space Strike Canary Wharf