Skeptic Revamps $1M Psychic Prize

Ten years after stage magician and avowed skeptic James Randi first offered a seven-figure payday to anyone capable of demonstrating paranormal phenomenon under scientific scrutiny, the 79-year-old clear-eyed curmudgeon is revising the rules of his nonprofit foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge to better target high-profile charlatans, and spend less time on unknown psychics, who too often turn out to be delusional instead of deceptive.

Technorati Tags: skeptic, psychic, Randi, paranormal

Did NASA really spend $1 million for a space pen, while the soviet’s used a simple pencil? This is a common story that, it turns out, is not quite true…

Fact or Fiction?: NASA Spent Millions to Develop a Pen that Would Write in Space, whereas the Soviet Cosmonauts Used a Pencil

During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils. This tale with its message of simplicity and thrift–not to mention a failure of common sense in a bureaucracy–floats around the Internet, hopping from in-box to in-box, and even surfaced during a 2002 episode of the West Wing. But, alas, it is just a myth.

Technorati Tags: myth, NASA, space, legend

Here is an interesting article on complementary/alternative medicine. Have a look at the comments as well, since they present the usual collection of justifications, reactions, and anecdotes.

Complementary medicines are useless and dangerous, says Britain’s foremost expert

Useless. Dangerous. Even crooked. The brutal verdict on our most popular complementary cures – by Britain’s foremost expert:

A lot of interest groups were very puzzled because, surely, complementary medicine was, by and large, very safe, and mainstream medicine was where you had side-effects,’ says Ernst, who is professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth.

‘But when we did our research we found a lot of surprises – and since we started our work 13 years ago, various things have been banned from the market because they are so unsafe.’

…

his department has published well over 1,000 research papers and tested a hugely diverse number of therapies, making it the most productive research unit in the world in this field.