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 just goes to show the stupidity flowing freely within religious organizations such as the American Family Association. Their decoration ideas for Christmas include a large Christmas Cross with 210 lights attached to it, that looks like this

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!

My reply to an arrogant comment by a Christian vividly illustrates my split personality: my skeptical and rational self, versus my religious self (I am a Pastafarian after all). Which one will prevail?

From Prof. Massimo Pigliucci (Rationally Speaking) I learned about a new study that just appeared on Science: “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality”, authored by Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff. In the study the authors “examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people.” And a most interesting study it is!

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

Delving deep into the science blogosphere this past week, I bring to you, my beloved readers, the highest quality content from around the globe! We’ve got stuff on how BBC got it wrong on the geographical mapping of happiness in Britain; ten things you didn’t know about Earth; another failed test of the vaccine-autism link hypothesis; lists of questions flying all around the place -for biologists, pastors, students…

Jonathan Wells is a creationist that has written “Icons of Evolution”, a book full of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of evolutionary science. Wells has also released a list of “10 Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher“, a list that supposedly contains 10 questions that an evolutionary biologist cannot answer -thus rendering the theory wrong!