badscienceblogs

Principle Healthcare, who removed claims from their website shortly after I contacted the MHRA in 2009, also made some claims on their website for products that did not come under the jurisdiction of the MHRA. So, with their remit extended to cover marketer’s own websites, I thought I’d try the ASA… Principle Healthcare’s Website Here’s [...]

There seems to be some template ‘health’ journalists (particularly those at the Metro) use to write about alternative‘s to medicine. It goes something like this:- 1. Profess scepticism about the latest woo 2. Give it a try anyway 3. Woo practitioner performs some jiggery-pokery and claims to have found a problem previously un-noticed by the [...]

In this week’s New Scientist the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had this to say about those of us who eat meat:- …[Meat-eaters], like smokers trying to quit tobacco find it very hard to give up the stuff despite ethical, health and environmental reasons to do so… Today I emailed the [...]

The ‘bits of satellite might fall on your head’ story that has been all over the news this week (see e.g. the Telegraph here) has provided a nice chance for people to get the wrong end of the statistical stick. For instance, as I was having the last of my breakfast this morning I heard [...]

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Self confessed geek and photographer Mark Meyer makes images that “narrate, persuade, inspire and inform”. He wanted to know the exact colours present in his pack of crayons. What to do then, but put them through a spectrophotometer?

Mark says:

These questions have been nagging me since kindergarten and this weekend I finally got to the bottom of it. I am now able to answer that age-old question: what really is the difference between green-yellow and yellow-green?

Many more nerdy charts and breakdowns at Mark’s website.

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As it’s shaping up to be my final days in Devon, me and my #1 Nerd travelled to Barometer World, a pilgrimage we’d been promising to make since the start of summer. As the name suggests, it’s a Mecca of meteorological wonder, boasting hundreds of aneroid and mercury barometers, barographs, thermometers, hygrometers and thunder bottles. It’s a bargain at £2.50 and I encourage everyone to go.

What intrigued me most of all, though, was the strange crystals attached to many of the old barometers. This, I was told, was storm glass, a curiosity whose origins are hidden in the mists of time.

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A couple of weeks back there were numerous reports such as this one saying that research has shown that the use of medication such as ibuprofen can increase the risk of miscarriage by 2.4 times. The figures that then followed did not seem to support this assertion and as usual there was no link to [...]

While discussing South Park with a friend, the subject of chicken pox came up and my friend asserted that chicken pox was always mild in babies. Being an insufferable pedant, I picked up on the word “always” and queried the claim. As I didn’t have access to Pubmed (or the CDC or HPA pages on [...]