I can tell that Rebecca Watson is running scared. She is so ashamed and intimidated by the fact that Dr Eliza Sutton has accused unnamed Skepchicks and named FtBer of transmitting STDs (she might do it again!) that she’s forced to recant and admit that there are many good reasons not to attend her Quiz-O-Tron in San Francisco on 25 October.
I have to admit that my first response to these reports out of Britain that stem cells had been successfully used to repair a complete spinal cord transection was skepticism — incredulity even. They’re reporting that a man with a completely severed spinal cord at level T10-T11 is able to walk again! The Guardian gushes! The Daily Mail gets in the act (always a bad sign)! When I read that the patient had an 8mm gap in his spinal cord that had been filling up with scar tissue for the last two years, I was even more doubtful: under the best of conditions, it was unlikely that you’d get substantial connectivity across that distance.
So I read the paper. I’m less skeptical now, for a couple of reasons. They actually did this experiment on 3 people, and all showed degrees of improvement, although the newspapers are all focusing on just the one who had the greatest change. The gradual changes are all documented thoroughly and believably. And, sad to say, the improvements in the man’s motor and sensory ability are more limited and more realistic than most of the accounts would have you think.
Maybe you should also read this exposé of all the dramatic exaggerations in that book. It’s kind of like if everything you know about sharks came from the movie Jaws — you’re a walking talking source of ignorance.
Hey, gang — you know Freethoughtblogs and Skepchick sponsor a whole science and skepticism track at the Convergence science fiction & fantasy convention in Bloomington, Minnesota every year, right? It happens over the Fourth of July weekend, but the planning begins in November — it’s a fairly involved process!
Browse this list of images…all of them of real, live, genuine zombified organisms. Just in time for Halloween!
I have never seen an own goal as dramatic as GamerGate — it has exposed a whole vast collection of unpleasant characters. Here’s a list of the “bad apples” of gamergate, who are categorized as a ridiculous mob of d-list right-wingers. In particular, take a look at Mike Cernovich, who we’ve encountered before — what a piece of work. What we’re learning is that it has always been this way, and i’s alway been a misogynistic movement with a lot of overlap with the same harassing atheists.
They’re an ugly bunch. It’s good to see them expose themselves like this.
A paper that made extravagant weight loss claims for green coffee beans has been retracted. This study had been touted by Dr Oz, of course — no fraud is to ludicrous for him — and rebutted by Scott Gavura, and I’m generally suspicious of any dietary supplement that promises weight loss without reducing calories or increasing exercise. But there’s one bit that surprised me. The study was done in India by a guy named Mysore Nagendran, and it was sponsored by Applied Food Sciences, Inc. (AFS), the company trying to exploit this Miracle Weight Loss Supplement. They couldn’t get it published, so…
After that last post, here’s a little palate cleanser: Ocean Atlas, an underwater sculpture of a Bahamian girl supporting the weight of the ocean, by Jason deCaires Taylor.
I really, really don’t understand the minds behind this: I’m getting a bunch of messages from sniggering puerile slymepit types who have jumped on a hashtag bandwagon, #wherespzmyers. They’ve got a photo of my face photoshopped onto a plush doll, and then they photoshop that into various scenes.
Warning: the very first image that turned up at that link above is a smiling picture of me spliced into a graphic ISIS beheading photo.
It’s where Ken Ham comes from, you know, and apparently the region has a bit of a reputation. Not everyone from Queensland can be bog-ignorant, of course, so it’s perfectly reasonable that someone from Queensland would be appointed head of the Australian national science organization, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). So good on their latest head.
