Antiscience

Check your theory here first. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

I don't know why this is, but whenever I hear a pseudoscientist invoke the name of Stephen Hawking for any reason, they almost always get his name wrong. It's either Hawkin, Hawkins, or Hawkings; almost never do they get it correct as Hawking. Why? It's a mystery. Perhaps saying it right would burn their tongue. Whenever I do get this email from a crank, wanting me to read his lengthy PDF tome on a new model of physics for the universe, or whatever it is, I reflect on what it was that made him think I was likely to be receptive to it. The answer is obvious: it's the association of the idea of skepticism with the title of the show Skeptoid. He figured that I, as the skeptic, am the adversary of the mainstream and the champion of the maverick, looking to tear down the dark-aged establishment using the radiance of new ideas as my weapon. This is kind of a half-right definition of skepticism. Yes, we do want to shine the light of science on the ideas around us to see what...

Stem cell research is a hot field of science and, according to statistics, also a rather scandal-prone one. Articles in this area are retracted 2.4 times more often than the average for biomedicine, and over half of these retractions are due to fraud. Does the “heat” of stem cell research – the high levels of funding, prestige and media coverage it enjoys – somehow encourage fraud? That’s what our experience of medical research leads us to suspect. While there isn’t enough data to actually prove this, we do have some key indicators. We have, for example, a growing list of scientific celebrities who have committed major stem cell fraud. There is South Korea’s Hwang Woo-suk who, in 2004, falsely claimed to have created the first human embryonic stem cells by means of cloning. A few years ago, Japan’s Haruko Obokata pulled a similar con when she announced to the world a new and simple – and fake – method of turning ordinary body cells into stem cells. Hwang, Obokata and Macchiarini were a...