Good afternoon my loyal readers. The web crawl in the scientific blogosphere is about to begin! Fasten your seatbelts! This instalment includes the not-so-far-fetched possibility of restoring a real-life Mammoth; research reporting on the dangers of vitamin overdose; mishandling of probabilities on the evolution of life “debate”; and putting the blame for an unfortunate student suicide on Richard Dawkins…

This is bizarre to say the least. Fiona Phillips at the Mirror (yes, yes, this bastion of accurate news reporting, but anyway) presents her belief that Prince Charles will become a favorite among people -because apparently “he minds about people” and “he put [sic] his money where his mouth is when […] he set up the Prince’s Trust“.

A favorite methodology amongst cranks and woo-meisters is to take legitimate scientific research, and distort or misrepresent its findings until they suit the crank’s presumptions and belief system. And since we all know that Homeopathy is the biggest branch of woo, let’s see how they torture scientific evidence using a huge manufacturer as a use case: Boiron.

Welcome, welcome, all three of you. Once again I have the best available stories for you. The menu today includes: a discussion of the common myth that we need 8 glasses of water per day; the problem of duplicate science publications along with an interesting (if not funny) use case; an especially interesting discussion of the creationists attacks on neuroscience and materialism; and a primer on the potential causes and explanations of placebo-like effects on animals!

Keyword: evidence. In this post we will explore how the whale.to website (in familiar pseudoscientific methodology) misrepresents scientific evidence in order to advance their agenda of eliminating vaccines (and probably all science-based medicine?).

Many of you might be familiar with this well of stupidity and misinformation that is the whale.to website. It is a centre for propagation of bad science and misleading information that have probably led a number of people into rejecting vaccination thus resulting in the recent outbreaks in the UK and US. So let’s expose some of their ludicrous ideas!

It is that time again for me to present to my fanatic audience, the posts that stood apart during my latest safari in the science blogosphere! What’s on the menu this {week, fortnight, month, random}? We have a little bit of politics including the vice-presidential debate and McCain conceding defeat in Michigan; the missing basic science in statistical analysis of clinical trials; while at the same time Happy Jihad wonders “Could God create a rock so heavy that he could not lift it?“

Lots of concentrated woo so be careful: the top five misinformation and ignorance campaigns.