Have a look at this recently launched public health campaign, pithily titled “Stop the Spread“. It aims to address the problem of overweight in the general population. Co-ordinated by Safefood, the statutory body responsible for the promotion of food safety in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the […]
Video
This week’s carcinogen: Your mobile phone
So it looks as though we are all going to die. Again. This time it’s our mobile phones that are going to kill us. And who says so? Well, exactly. As in, the WHO says so. In a news story that has captured the imagination of cancer obsessives around the […]
“Racecardgate” on Storify
This is a slightly unusual format for a post on this blog, but I thought it was worth recording for posterity. It concerns the rather bizarre suggestion made yesterday by some UK-based homeopaths about a good way of defending homeopathy against formal complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. Rather than […]
Towards a quantum Theory of Everything (including dirty dishes)
Perhaps few words in contemporary science have been abused as much as “quantum”. Simply put, a quantum is the minimum amount of an entity that can actually do anything. One example is a photon, which is the minimum amount of light that can be involved in an electromagnetic interaction. The […]
The Babel Fish Dilemma: Talking Science with Non-Scientists
Last night I gave a public lecture in Dublin for the Irish Skeptics Society, entitled “The Babel Fish Dilemma: Talking Science with Non-Scientists“. The Irish Skeptics, under the leadership of psychologists Paul O’Donoghue and Nóirín Buckley, have been organizing a public lecture series on science engagement, critical thinking, and skepticism […]
“Atheists die first”: CNN’s “expert” fights back
This is psychologist, Dr Wendy Walsh, discussing the merits of religion on CNN. Rather melodramatically, she is focusing on the purported advantage of being religious during catastrophic survival situations. According to Walsh, “Most studies on survivors show that the atheists die first“, suggesting that religious people survive longer. This news […]




