Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs?

You have to hand it to the creationists, especially the “young-Earth” variety. They are endlessly creative in concocting new rationales for their worldviews. Even when they have to twist into mental contortions, they manage to say it all with a straight face. For example, if, as they contend, the Earth is only six thousand years …

The scientific enterprise places high value on honesty and openness. These and other values serve it well. Nevertheless, a variety of challenges to the integrity of scientific research have been cause for much recent soul-searching. There is growing concern, for example, that substantial percentages of published results in some fields, biomedicine and psychology in particular, …

The March 9 Nature reported some disturbing news: “An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review.” The controversy arose when psychologist Gert Storm declared that he would review only papers whose data he …

On March 3, 2017, the Texas Medical Board sanctioned Houston internist Stanislaw Burzynski for over a hundred violations related to his cancer clinic. However, despite these sanctions, Burzynski will be allowed to keep his medical license and continue to practice on patients. For decades, Burzynski has peddled a chemotherapy he calls “antineoplastons” (ANP) under the …

Many skeptics outside Sweden first encountered Professor Hans Rosling at the European Skeptics Congress 2013 in Stockholm. That was a day engraved in our memories. Rosling had enthralled us with his fascinating presentation of the world’s data. How wrong we were about so many things that we believed about the world. Years earlier, in 2006, …

We often think of the need for critical thinking in the context of nonscientific approaches to extraordinary claims about the natural world. We call that pseudoscience, and as an antidote we often prescribe more science courses, especially those focusing on skeptical thinking. But critical thinking is not unique to the sciences. A study by two …

Joe Nickell solves the case of an unlikely ghost, hidden in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave

James Randi addresses the sham of ‘Facilitated Communication’

Fernando Pucci recently died at age eighty-six. He was the last of the serial killers collectively known as the “Mostro di Firenze,” the Monster of Florence, or “i compagni di merende,” the “picknicking friends,” as they started to be called during trials after one of the convicted killers, Mario Vanni, described his relationship with the …

Partisan protests put public trust in scientists at risk.

Quick quiz: What caused the Great Recession of 2008? OK, I admit it. That’s an unfair question. It was complicated. If you’ve done some homework, you might be able to mumble something about a housing bubble, subprime lending, mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, big banks, irresponsible borrowers, George W. Bush, Barack Obama…. But there is one …

Ben Radford explains a strange mist found in a Phoenix woman’s driveway.

Enthusiastic Response Your March/April 2017 issue has provoked me to make an enthusiastic response. I’m a longtime subscriber since the early ’80s. I had seen your journal mentioned in an article and was very curious. I actually had to write to the publisher to get a subscription. First, Lindsay’s “Why Skepticism?” spoke to my own …

To support their claim that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, numerous antievolution publications—including grade-school science textbooks—assert that dragon legends were inspired by human encounters with fire-breathing dinosaurs. Here’s why that’s unrealistic.

According to the young-Earth creationist (YEC) worldview, God created the Earth and the rest of the universe during a single week about 6,000 years ago, and he created humans and other kinds of organisms independently during the same week, as described in Genesis. This view rejects the abundant physical evidence that the Earth is over …

The death of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey went unsolved for two decades. 
Psychics were worse than useless, but the author’s proposed solution resulted from evaluating the best evidence.


Newly obtained recordings provide a unique opportunity to assess the sessions of a genuine “psychic detective” police case.

Chromotherapy, also known as color therapy, is a pseudomedicine based on a holistic approach and on a mixture of esoteric and scientific concepts. In a nutshell, it is the use of colored light applied on the skin or eyes to heal various health disorders, assuming some (scientifically undescribed) beneficial effects of color on body and …

In his “Missing411” series of books, author David Paulides claims that people are going missing from U.S. national parks under unusual circumstances and the National Park Service is obstructing attempts to investigate. What are the facts?

In her acclaimed bestselling book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Time, New Yorker staff writer Maria Konnikova reveals the nefarious tricks of the con artist’s trade, showing us how frauds and charlatans manipulate us by playing on our vulnerabilities and what we perceive to be our best qualities. She does so with …

Geoffrey Kabat debunks elusive health risks in his new book.

Robert Sheaffer is one of the—if not the—world’s top experts on the subject of unidentified flying objects and claims of extraterrestrials, and he shares that knowledge in his new book Bad UFOs.

Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot. By Joe Gisondi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8032-4994-3. 278 pp. Softcover, $18.95. With Joe Gisondi’s Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot, the subtitle says it all. Gisondi, an outsider, traveled with Bigfooters—those credulous folk motivated to search for the fabled creature despite zero scientific …