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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking Television

How not to report science and medical news, vaccine edition

I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I’m writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield’s being found to have […]

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Entertainment/culture Medicine Surgery Television

Cinema science: Actual surgeons doing science! In the 1940s!

Last night was grant crunch time to get a truly serviceable draft to my collaborators today as promised, leaving enough time to revise it by the February 5 deadline. That means the blog has to take a hit today, which is a shame, because Joe Mercola and Age of Autism have laid down some idiocy […]

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Entertainment/culture Physics Science Television

The scale of it all

If you ever want to get a sense of the scale of the universe and how insignificant our little planet is compared to the scope of it all, here’s something really cool to put things in perspective, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History’s Astronomy Picture of the Day: It’d be really cool if […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Popular culture Quackery Surgery Television

Dr. Mehmet Oz: Gone completely over to the Dark Side

For some reason, I’ve tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I just haven’t paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it’s because, even when he was on Oprah’s show, he didn’t delve as deeply into the […]

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Entertainment/culture Humor Television

When Santa met Jack Bauer

It’s Christmas, and I hope that those of you who celebrate the day are having a merry one. Personally, I’m taking the day off from any substantive blogging, instead electing to post quickie holiday-themed stuff that amuses me. Still, it might not be so merry if everyone’s favorite elf happened to have met the wrong […]