The 2017 John Maddox Prize Winner – Riko Muranaka

John Maddox Prize

Pictured above is Dr Riko Muranaka who has won the 2017 John Maddox prize. First, a bit of context – what is the John Maddox Prize? The John Maddox Prize is an annual award give by the UK based charity Sense about Science and has been running since 2012. John Maddox himself was a Biologist, … Read more

Anti-vaccine rates may finally be declining

anti-vaccine

Vaccination not only works, but it works well. Smallpox is gone, and Polio, Tetanus, and Measles, have all been greatly restricted. Nobody would seriously advocate a return to the 18th century, a time when as many as 400,000 europeans died each and every year of smallpox alone, and yet the arise of an anti-vaccine movement … Read more

Happier Times: President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner

Obama has a sense of humour

Whatever your politics might happen to be, you simply can’t deny that the man had (and still has) both class and dignity, then enacted that special magic of combining all that with a sense of humour. Well OK, some might deny it, but they tend to be the same folks who deem reality, science, and … Read more

Weekly Weird Religious News – Roy Moore special edition

weekly weird religious news

It is perhaps almost inevitable for Roy Moore to pop up in the weekly weird religious news. As the modern incarnation of rather extreme right-wing “Christian” values, he has garnered rather a lot of popular support from right-wing evangelicals despite the mounting and very believable evidence via multiple sources that he is rather fond of … Read more

UK NHS is blacklisting Homeopathy and Herbal remedies

homeopathy

The news is that the UK’s publicly funded National Health Service has blacklisted Homeopathy and also Herbal remedies. Now, you might be tempted to think that they have finally decided to pay attention to the evidence that clearly demonstrates that it simply does not work at all … right? Nope, that is not the driving force … Read more

The Evolution of the Yeti

The term Yeti is a familiar one to most people. It describes the ape-like creature that supposedly dwells in the snow peaked Himalayas. For most this is simply a popular cultural myth, but some true believers do exist. Just to be clear … Quantity of actual scientific evidence that the Yeti is or was real … Read more