In 1963, Jose Delgado entered a bull-fighting ring in Cordova, Spain, along with a 500 kg heavy, angry bull. Delgado was not a matador and had never done anything like this before. Yet, he easily avoided the charging bull without even moving at all -just by pressing a button!

On the 24th of November 1859, 149 years ago, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” with the (often misunderstood) subtitle: “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life“. Happy Birthday!

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…

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.

This instalment of “Mathematical Paradoxes” focuses on a much more important issue than coin flipping or live shows: rare disease testing. What should you do in case you test positive to a very rare disease?

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?).

Ben Goldacre, of “The Guardian” fame, currently sits top of the charts in Amazon book sales in the Popular Science category. His (very) recent book “Bad Science” was an immediate hit, something that is both comforting and a bit unexpected (at least for me).