… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. One of them is the potato blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans. The leaves & stems of an infected plant blacken & fall, & the tubers […]
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but it does no harm…
Over on Code for Life, Grant’s recently put up some posts concerning homeopathy (here & here, for example). He’s also suggested that homeopathic (& other) remedies should carry disclaimers to do with their active ingredients (or lack thereof) and what they can & can’t do. Anyway, one of the common responses to articles critical of homeopathy […]
Continue readingthe 8-glasses-a-day myth
I was at the gym yesterday when I read something in a women’s mag that quite put me off my stride on the cross-trainer. (In my defence, I’d forgotten to take a book & the only other reading material on offer was car magazines.) The offending article contained the following factoids: you need to drink at […]
Continue readingwhat’s your ‘risk intelligence quotient’?
‘Risk intelligence quotient’ (RQ) – something I’d heard about but never really thought about until I read one of PZ’s posts today. (Where on earth does he find the time to write so much???) Turns out that RQ is the subject of a private research project that hopes to assess levels of risk intelligence in the general population. Risk […]
Continue readinggrumpiness is best?
Today’s Herald carried a story from the UK’s Telegraph, which looked at some research into the social behaviour of chimpanzees & bonobos (‘pigmy’ chimanzees). And – as usual – extrapolated from this to people… Grumpiness, it told is, was a sign of a more ‘advanced’ nature, whereas the happier, more peaceable bonobos were ‘less evolved’.
Continue readingavatar
The family finally got its act together & went to see Avatar. In 3D 🙂 (Actually our act was arranged by friends, who also organised us into an al fresco meal of fish’n’chips beforehand.) I carefully didn’t read anything much about the movie before I went, so I’m aware that what I’ve got to say has probably been said before – but […]
Continue readinga quick lesson from statistics :-)
Frm PHD Comics (via Pharyngula): I couldn’t agree more 🙂
Continue readingmms revisited
A while ago I wrote a post on the so-called ‘miracle mineral supplement’, aka MMS. I thought I’d re-post it following an article debunking this nostrum in the Sunday Star-Times. My original post attracted a couple of comments from people claiming that MMS will cure a multitude of ills; I’ve reproduced them, & my responses, […]
Continue readingasking the right questions
A colleague sent me advance notice of an upcoming protest: a ‘mass overdose’ of sugar pills being organised as a protest against ‘homeopathic remedies’. (Grant picked up on this & has blogged on it over at SciBlogs. This got me thinking (as these things do) about an interesting podcast by Mark Crislip, who focuses on supplements & ‘complementary & […]
Continue readingcommunicating science – an example of good practice
The following is from the Young Australian Skeptics website – I’ve copied the whole post across because it’s a brief one (& I’ve added links to book reviews): We probably have all encountered scientifically ignorant people, for some people knowing the complexities of the universe is simply not interesting. This ignorance is generally spawned within […]
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