… and the air will go up to the right side of your brain & improve your creativity. NOT!!! I thought I’d seen a fair bit of nonsense but this one was new to me. It’s one of several pseudoscientific claims that are due for a right royal debunking next month. Unfortunately this is in […]
Continue readingCategory: critical thinking
shades of jurassic park
A couple of nights ago I caught the end of a TV ‘news’ item about mammoths. Molecular biologists have managed to sequence the mammoth genome – the next thing, said the reporter breathlessly, will be bringing mammoths back to life…
Continue readingit’s different at uni – part 2 (& a guest post!)
This is a little different: a guest blog by a friend of mine. Grant works as an independent scientist through his one-man consultancy, BioinfoTools, which mainly develops software for analysis of genetic and molecular biology data, and offers data analysis,contract research and science writing. He has his own research interests currently with a central theme […]
Continue readinghuman-chimp similarities – evolution? or design?
(Another link-&-comment today – I’m at a conference & a bit short of time for longer posts.) The Sensuous Curmudgeon offers a dry commentary on a web-post by the Discovery Institute oops Institute for Creation Research (thanks to the Curmudgeon). The DI post is itself a commentary on a recent research paper looking at the […]
Continue readingdo you go ‘wow!’ at big numbers?
Quite probably – even though it’s quite hard to envisage what a really really big number means. But people can also be swayed by big numbers when they shouldn’t be. Ben Goldacre gives an example in his latest post. A media story about a particular statin (a drug used to lower the levels of ‘bad’ […]
Continue readinganother example of critical thinking…
… this time about climate change. It’s on the blog Hot Topic, where the author has written a rather sceptical review of an item in the Dominion-Post newspaper. The newspaper story included the statement that greenhouse gases don’t cause global warming – rather surprising, given that in the absence of some level of greenhouse gases the […]
Continue readingsomething fishy here…
It seems that fish oil is back in the news. This morning’s Herald carried an item about a school that’s trialling the use of omega-3 fish oils in enhancing student performance. They obviously haven’t heard of the Durham ‘trials’ in the UK…
Continue readingrain man? – rainfall & autism
I get a daily compendium of science-related headlines – yesterday one in particular caught my eye. It said: Autism linked with rainfall in study: Children who live in the US Northwest’s wettest counties are more likely to have autism, but it is unclear why.
Continue readingvolcanic eruptions & human bottlenecks
We know, from looking at the amount of genetic variation in the global human population, that it went through a fairly pronounced bottleneck around 70,000 years ago. This has been variously attributed to the founder effect, with only small populations moving out of Africa into Europe & Eurasia, and to the devastating consequences of the […]
Continue readingwind farms & bird kill
Here’s another exercise in thinking carefully about the question: wind farms & bird kills. In the US, it’s been suggested that up to 40,000 birds might be killed by flying (splat! poof!) into wind farm turbines each year. Figures like this are put forward in arguments against wind farms but – in relation to bird kills […]
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