Skeptophilia

To end the week on an appropriately surreal note: no, the Earth will not "lose its gravity" for seven seconds on August 12 . I fou...

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the (in)famous sort-of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, author of bestsellers like The Teachings of Don...

There's a general rule that once a baseless claim is made, getting people to dis believe in it is nearly impossible. This is a pattern t...

The general rule is that you should always  try to rule out all the natural and normal explanations for something before you jump to a super...

Okay, can we all please please puhleeeeeez  stop posting stuff without checking to see if it's true? I know it's a pain in the ass, ...

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urb...

One thing that really  torques me is when people say "I did my research," when in fact what they did was a five-minute Google sear...

Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England? I'm guessing probably not.  At least I hadn...

Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."...