Amazing Satellite Photography
… but not from Earth. This photo has been doing the rounds of the (astronomy) news sites, but it simply is too good not to mention it here. The Cassini mission has spotted this likeliness of the Nile...
View ArticleA Speck in the Eye
Imagine always having your computer with you. No I don’t mean the latest smart phone that is in your pocket. Really with you … as in your eye. Or more precisely as a lens on your eyeball. Last year...
View ArticleCool New Motorcycle Helmet Technology
A small company in California, 6D Helmets, has unveiled some interesting new technologies in motorcycle helmets. As a long time dirt and street motorcyclist, this caught my attention. Let’s take a look...
View ArticleKickstarting Skepticism
Here on the blog we recently covered some woo-themed Kickstarter projects. That got me to thinking: what sort of skeptical Kickstarter projects are out there? Kickstarter is the “in thing” right now...
View Article2012 predictions in technology – psychic or science?
At year’s end it is kind of skeptical tradition to go over various psychic predictions for that year. Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast does it, and invariably these predictions are either...
View Article“Hello, this is Antarctica calling”
Most of you are probably aware of the Arecibo observatory, world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. Constructed in a natural valley in Puerto Rico, it is still one of the work horses in radio...
View ArticleVoices from the past
Recently, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has resurrected a very old recording from 1878. Not the oldest recording ever (dating from 1860), but it seems the oldest in the States. PBS has a...
View ArticleAnti-Viral Ads: DirecTV Genie
Advertisements upset me. They seem designed to appeal to the misinformed, uninformed, or gullible; preying upon every emotional and logical weakness they can find. I often find myself insulted on...
View ArticleAnti-Viral Ads: HD Vision Sunglasses
Advertisements upset me. They seem designed to appeal to the misinformed, uninformed, or gullible; preying upon every emotional and logical weakness they can find. I often find myself insulted on...
View ArticleLENR: A bright future? Part 1
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) is the current label used for the troubled concept of cold fusion. Cold fusion was brought into the public conciousness by two scientists, Pons and Fleischmann, who...
View ArticleGhost Illusions From Metamaterials
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have released details from an upcoming paper (to be published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials this month) about using metamaterials to...
View ArticleTelescope in the sky
Imagine that you can get your hands on a Boeing 747. What would you do? Well, probably not what NASA did: they cut a 10-by-10 foot hole in the back of the airplane, and installed a big telescope in it....
View ArticleLENR: A bright future? Part 2
It’s time to close out my look at LENR. Join me as we take a look at the Weak Nuclear Force, the Weak Interaction Theory and chase down a few references provided by commenters of the last article. The...
View ArticleColouring the past
“An image is worth more than a thousand words”, so goes the saying. And rightly so. As a history enthusiast I am by default interested in reading reports and descriptions from things longtime past. But...
View ArticleSo You Want To Go To Mars?
This year, a number of privately run organizations have been publicizing plans for manned missions to Mars, making the Curiosity rover feel undervalued and generally morose. But if you’re like me and...
View ArticleHow an Excel error impacted the world
In 2010, an important economic science paper was published by Reinhart and Rogoff (pdf here). One of their main points was that countries with a public debt above 90% of GDP had a significant lower...
View ArticleGoing to Mars with MAVEN
The Mars Rovers have shown us that minerals exist on Mars that only form in the presence of water. This discovery confirms the idea that the barren planet used to have potentially life-bearing water on...
View ArticleThe International Space Station
Image above: The space station is one of the brightest objects in the sky. Image Credit: NASA The International Space Station (ISS) is basically an enormous science lab orbiting about 354 kilometers...
View ArticleThe real speaking robot
This is just an amazing piece of technology, even though it’s not complete yet. After the robotic music band, here is the talking robot. No, I mean really talking, not just (as we are already used to)...
View ArticleNo, You Can’t Charge Your Phone Battery In 20 Seconds
Eesha Khare did something pretty incredible. She experimented with materials and developed one which acts like a supercapacitor – a capacitor with a structure which allows for a much smaller package...
View ArticleFacebook Has Viral Warning Cell Phones Killing Us Again.
Facebook has gone viral again with a scary warning and advice about breast cancer and cell phones. Keep your cell phone out of your shirt pocket/bra it MAY be giving you breast cancer. This is promoted...
View ArticleJuno: Unlocking Jupiter’s Mysteries (with videos)
Image Credit: NASA Juno is a NASA New Frontiers mission to Jupiter that launched on August 5th, 2011 and is due to arrive in orbit in July 2016. This mission is unique because it is the first that...
View ArticleFrankenmeatophobia
Over ten years ago, I wrote a short piece about the potential for meat grown in a laboratory. The process is straightforward: acquire muscle tissue from an animal and endlessly propagate it to produce...
View ArticleReaders as Editors: CNN Continues to Embarrass Itself
A few years ago, to much fanfare, CNN.com dissolved its science department and replaced it with The Belief Blog and The Empowered Patient. In effect, this was to eliminate the costs of needing anyone...
View ArticleIs It Time To Give Up Facebook?
We all know that the mainstream media loves a good, link-baiting headline, and that they are prone to simplification and exaggeration when it comes to science discoveries. So whenever I see the news...
View ArticleTesting the road to ITER
You may have heard of ITER, the international collaboration project to build a huge experimental fusion reactor in the south of France. As Wikipedia indicates, its goal is to increase our understanding...
View Article3D-scanning Napoleon’s battlefield at Borodino
The company Artec 3D recently reported on work they did for the Russian academy of sciences in scanning the battlefield of Borodino. This is the site of the major battle in Napoleon’s 1812 campaign in...
View ArticleSeven bucks per centimer of audio woo
One of my favourite blogs I follow is Big Picture from Bobby Owsinski, producer, audio engineer and author of several books on audio recording and engineering. Mr Owsinski from time to time posts...
View ArticleSome more 3D scanning in science
One of the finer moments when writing for this blog, is when people who you mention in the article, contact you. In my post on Napoleon’s battlefield in Borodino (Russia) the podcaster Cameron Reilly...
View ArticleWhy Would Bill Gates Want to Kill One Billion People?
Viral video aggregator Upworthy has been in the news a lot lately, mostly for their meteoric rise in popularity and maddening-yet-effective headline writing style. One element of the site that didn’t...
View ArticleA Blogger Goes Looking For A Catchy Title. You Will Be Shocked at What He Found!
Writing titles for my blog posts here on Skeptoid have always been a bit of a conundrum. It ends up being a mix of thinking back to my high school English classes, influences from modern internet...
View Article2013 predictions in technology – really predictions or just extrapolations?
I want to join the skeptical meme to evaluate past predictions to see if they came through. Not astrological or any other psychic babble, but like last year I’m going to analyse the predictions in IT...
View ArticleAbout That Turing Test Win…
This past weekend, the media was all abuzz about how the Turing test had just been passed by a computer. This was an amazing achievement that heralded a new milestone in computing history. Or was it?...
View ArticleGMO Labeling: Consumer Protection or Fear Mongering?
The use of Genetically Modified Organisms, better known as GMO, is an area of debate among skeptics. GMO is actually a broad term that has a lot of moving parts. Forced labeling for consumer foods...
View ArticleTruvada, the Preventative HIV Drug
The preventative HIV drug Truvada, one of several HIV pre-exposure prophylaxes (PrEP) endorsed by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease control, has renewed discourse surrounding...
View ArticleThe Anti-Vaccine Playbook: Freedom of Speech
Writer’s Note: I wanted to write my own collection of nonsense spewed by pseudoscience peddlers. I will be starting with vaccines, but I may expand it into other topics as well at some point. I want to...
View ArticleAnother E-Cat Test: Success?
Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat machine has been wowing folks for some time now. This device is claimed to produce considerable amounts of energy via Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). I’ve written about LENR...
View ArticleIn Defense of Electric Silence
For some time now, a few activists have proposed that a danger of electric cars is their silence to unsuspecting pedestrians. According to this claim, pedestrians are more likely to be struck by cars...
View ArticleSometimes a Cable Isn’t Just a Cable
A while ago I blogged about an expensive USB cable that claimed to increase the quality of music playback from a digital hard disk. That claim, of course, was complete and utter nonsense, as the...
View Article2014 Predictions in Technology: Getting Better
Each year in January, I make a roundup of one particular set of predictions in technology. They are written by Mark Anderson from Strategic News Service. Over the years, I’ve come to realise he’s not a...
View ArticleElectrohypersensitivity and Bad Reporting
The April 2015 issue of Popular Science includes a bizarre feature article that might give many readers cause for a double take: a detailed promotion of a thoroughly debunked pseudoscience. It is...
View ArticleWhen a Drone is Not a Drone
It’s unfortunate that language is often used carelessly. We frequently react to news emotionally rather than analytically; and when imprecise language elicits groundless fear, our reaction can be the...
View ArticleMyths and Facts About Uber
I recently had the chance to take my first ride with Uber, the ride-sharing app that’s gone from completely unknown to a valuation of over $40 billion in less than six years. While I’d heard quite a...
View ArticleHelping Build a Skeptical, Scientific Wikipedia
Hello Skeptoid readers. My name is Susan Gerbic. I’m planning on giving you an overview of one of the most amazing powerful projects that exists today in the world of scientific skepticism. That...
View ArticleHow Does an Airplane Stay in the Air?
For the longest time, I thought I knew why an airplane stayed in the air. It was because the wings were curved, and in such a way that the top was more curved than the underside. Air moving over the …...
View Article2015 Technology Predictions: Some Good, Some Bad, None Impressive
For a couple of years now I’ve been following Mark Anderson’s yearly top 10 tech at Strategic News Service. It is claimed that he has a 94% success rate (though it’s unclear if this claim comes...
View ArticleApple v. FBI: A Risk-based Discussion
Any opinion here, which I have tried to minimize, is just my own and not that of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or the University of Illinois where I work. I am merely trying to...
View ArticleDon’t Worry, You Can Still Give Your Rat that New Phone for its Birthday
By now, most people have read something from one or both sides of the story regarding new preliminary data published about cell phones and cancer, which Mother Jones referred to as “game changing.” As...
View ArticleTheranos: Marketing Trumps Science
When I first heard of Theranos and its diagnostic testing breakthrough there were no immediate alarm bells or red flags that caused me to look closely. I was impressed. It appeared to be a elegant...
View ArticleWhat is Your Telo-age?
After an extended break from blogging here on Skeptoid, a recent run of commercials on television offering to check your “cellular age” has inspired my interest enough to bring back a skeptical eye to...
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