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Yes, there is some good science on Youtube. I'm a fan of music played over Tesla coils personally.

But the Brainiac clip of alkali metals in a bathtub was admitted to be fraudulent. The producers didn't think the real reaction had enough bang, so they actually used explosives. You can catch more information about this from Bad Science or from a guy that actually did the reactions. The second link has a decent explanation too.

Notice how they refer to it as 'radiation', because radiation is clearly a *bad thing*. It killed all those people in Hiroshima didn't it? Nasty.

Well, never mind that 1W of radiation coming out of your phone or Wifi router. There's maybe 100W coming out of your light bulbs (or less if you have Al Gore-compliant lightbulbs). And what's more, that radiation doesn't pass straight through you, a lot of it is intercepted by the body! I think we need a campaign to stop radiation in the 400nm to 700nm wavelength range from infecting our children! Ban it now! That, and Dihydrogen Monoxide...

Bad Science has lots of info on this and other science quackery.

Ah, but with a national database of everything, the missing disks could be located with a simple search query!

And one of these?

"A reporter isn't a superhuman essayist researcher, they are your surrogate, your proxy. When there is a fire on your street at two in the morning, and you can't be bothered to go out in the rain, a reporter goes along in your place, and tells you what's going on, but he only does what you'd do: gossips with the neighbours; gets a word or two from whichever member of the emergency services happens to be walking past; and passes that on." ... from an interesting article at http://www.badscience.net/?p=550

These review guys are just journalists who claim to write reviews but are really just gossiping and passing on information they've been fed by manufacturers. They do the same with politics and science and anything else really - most of them should be ignored.

There was an interesting article about Mossman in the New Yorker a few months back - and indeed the manufacturers faun all over him like flies on s*** - he's got nothing to say except to dullard PHBs and neither has Pogue (whose podcasts are whiney c*** also).

Publishing scientific results and "Scientific Journalism" are two completely separate things, with different motivating factors at their heart. Publishing scientific results is the process of explaining clearly what you did, why you did it, what you observed and what you think those observations mean. It is intended to share the results of experimentation and to increase the overall body of knowledge in a given area of research. Scientific journalism sells soap. Its entire point is to make money for the reporting entity, whether that be a journalist or periodical. This does not mean there are no journalists doing good scientific reporting or that there are no scientist that are motivated by fame and fortune (Korean stem cell research comes to mind). If you stick to the purpose of scientific publications, (assumptions, methods, observations, conclusions etc.) you'll fill the purpose of scientific publications. Bad science has been referenced at /. before but here is a post that applies to the subject. http://www.badscience.net/?p=537

Its fraud to claim it works. Ignoring the logica Fallacy you present...several really, condisider this:

Where are the testable result? the falsifiable tests? the double blind studies?..oh yeah, they ALL turned up NOTHING.
It is fraud, it is immoral, it is dangerous and it FUCKING KILLS PEOPLE, you ignorant prick.

Here is a clue that someone isn't thinking logical:
People apply scientific rigors to the sacred cows, then when it turns up nothing, they blame the method. Claiming that there method is better.

Her letter is based on information from Lionel Milgrom who is a known liar and cheat, so there is no way to know if she got the actually information in any accurate way.
more clues that his is a scam artist, or a kook:

involved with people who have discovered some magic way to cure all the ails you:
http://www.photobiotics.com/index.html

He is one of the Directors of the Society of Homeopaths -- Not exactly unbiased. And before you say it, yes I know people are biased, that's why we have tests that reduce or eliminate it. Test that don't seem to work with Homeopaths.

A letter full of inaccuracies:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=341

Quackery at best.

SOrry about the prick comment, but come one, wake the fuck up.

As the article points out, the speculation that the color preference was to help women gather berries was on the part of the scientists who wrote the paper, not the journalists. And of course, if men had preferred the redder colors, they would have said it was an evolutionary adaptation to give them sensory reinforcement when spearing a woolly mammoth. I agree with the article, and I always get annoyed reading the circular, baseless speculation on the evolutionary causes of whatever is discovered. It has no place in a scientific paper. Give a little room to the unknown. Don't just throw it in the nearest a bucket like a retard.

BTW, the article, with the graphs from the study, which are interesting, is here: http://www.badscience.net/?p=518

Badscience.net http://www.badscience.net/ have been covering this quite extensively,as well as the silliness over the supposed MMR/autism link.

Did you even read the study? It wasn't investigating diseases, it was investigating electro-sensitivity to see if it was a real effect or a psychological effect.

They did a non-blinded and a blinded run. When the subjects knew the field was on or off, their symptoms correlated with it (not surprising). When they didn't know, their symptoms DIDN'T correlate with the field. That suggests the symptoms aren't caused by the field, but by their knowledge of it.

You can find a link to the study on this page:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=470

Talking of bad science, here are Ben Goldacre's comments. And here is also a copy of the original paper (30 double-spaced pages) so that you can judge for yourself.

Talking of bad science, here are Ben Goldacre's comments. And here is also a copy of the original paper (30 double-spaced pages) so that you can judge for yourself.

Good call - that road occasionally pays off.

Whatever might be causing their symptoms, it's apparently NOT electromagnetic waves. See this for details. It may be a very real symptom, but you should be more careful when making claims about WHAT caused it and you need a proper scientific study to rule out any other causes.

Until then, I'm going to have to go with all the published studies showing that, whatever might cause people to feel "EM sensitive", it's not actually EM that's causing it.

Use open access.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client =firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&oi= spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=open+access+scienc e+journals+&spell=1
http://www.badscience.net/?p=360

I wouldn't put any stock in that documentary. The guy that produced it is a known fraud, and it's been shown definitively that he altered graphs and data in this documentary as well as others that he has produced. He also quoted a number of climate scientists out of context, and those scientists are now on record as stating that their statements were selectively edited to make them look like they said something very different from what they said in their interviews. See here. There's also more information about Martin Durkin's (the documentary producer) dubious track record if you google it.

Don't believe me, go and watch this BBC documentary titled "The Global Warming Swindle"

You *do* know that has about as much legitimacy as an email from a nigerian prince don't you?

Let's not let the truth get in the way of a good story though... Martin Durkin never has.

See also:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=381

One final point. You'd better damned well hope that we are the cause of global warming. Because if we aren't then there's nothing we can do about it and we're all royally screwed.

Whether you choose to buy a new television set is pretty much a matter for you and your family alone. It might affect your neighbours if you turn the volume up too high, and of course the retailer and manufacturer benefit slightly, but other than that it has hardly any effect on those around you. So it's reasonably to leave that decision up to you.

However, whether or not you get immunised doesn't just affect you; it affects all those whom you go on to infect when you get infected (or become a carrier), because you chose against immunisation. It's a network effect.

Here in the UK, there's been quite a bit of (hysterical, unfounded, and irrational) public outcry against the combined MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine routinely given to young children. As a result, some parents are choosing instead to have their children given separate vaccines, or none at all. And so the rate of measles immunity in the population has fallen, causing health professionals to fear a measles epidemic, which would cause far far more harm than even the worst claims of the hysterics. Harm which wouldn't only apply to those who decided against the vaccine, or even their children; harm which would also come to a few of those who were vaccinated but caught the disease anyway.

So, given that the public as a whole are affected, isn't it reasonable for them to have some input to your decision?

Yes, seconded. It's almost total disinfo or bad science as far as I know. I read a proper scientific report on the effects of passive smoking, the main conlusion was that banning smoking in a bar saved the 40hour bar worker 6 cigarettes intake over a period of 12 months. It's an easy enough experiment to do and those were the results. If you smoked one cigarette every two months I don't think you'd be at any risk at all. There is no proven link to rising asthma rates and smoking either. My hunch is that the reason lies somewhere between vaccines damaging the immune system (also giving rise to increasing rates of allergies found in children) or exhaust pollution from cars. I worry that a scientifically illiterate populous can be so easily lead.

http://badscience.net/

This is a site I really enjoy and I recommend a read to see how much of this stuff is about.

Regards

You might want to check out Ben Goldacre's Bad Science articles on Brainiac here. As a sampler, here's what actually happens when you add alkali metals to water, rather than rely on stage explosive like the Brainiac crew.

fotherington

It was fairly extensively reported in the British media over the summer.

http://www.badscience.net/?p=270
Presumably they ended up faking an explosion where they placed lithium?? (Something highly reactive around lithium) into the bath tub. It just didn't explode so they blew it up using explosives. Much worst than the Mythbusters where their explosions actually happen and if it doesn't they make it clear they are blowing up stuff.

A good example of Bad Science. Why, who better to perform an interesting medical study than a couple of Economists!

The MMR vaccine:

http://www.badscience.net/?p=249

I would just like to say in my defense that in the form I submitted the story it wasn't just a shameless plug for my poster. It was a shameful plug disguised with interesting links to the recent Brainiac alkali metal explosions fiasco, which I'm genuinely surprised didn't get any attention on slashdot. Sorry about the server, again. It was supposed to be able to handle it. Unfortunately they have their hands around my bandwidth neck because for some reason our sysadmin department feels it's more important to keep wolfram.com running than my periodic table table site. Where is the appreciation for fine art in this world? If only people would buy my poster, I could afford more bandwidth for sodium explosions. There, now you have a truly shameless plug to complain about.

Those were faked with conventional explosives

http://www.badscience.net/?p=261

Sadly that was a fraud

"In fact the blast was not the result of a meeting between water and rubidium and caesium, but the triggering of a bomb, Sky television confirmed yesterday."

"But in a 2004 episode, the producers compromised. Explaining what happened when the metals were put in the bath, a crew member said: "Absolutely bloody nothing. The density of caesium ensured it hit the bottom of the bath like a lead weight. The volume of water then drowned out the thermal shock. They could not go home empty-handed. So they rigged a bomb in the bottom of the bath."

source: http://www.badscience.net/?p=270
and: http://www.badscience.net/?p=261

"In fact the blast was not the result of a meeting between water and rubidium and caesium, but the triggering of a bomb, Sky television confirmed yesterday."

"But in a 2004 episode, the producers compromised. Explaining what happened when the metals were put in the bath, a crew member said: "Absolutely bloody nothing. The density of caesium ensured it hit the bottom of the bath like a lead weight. The volume of water then drowned out the thermal shock. They could not go home empty-handed. So they rigged a bomb in the bottom of the bath."

source: http://www.badscience.net/?p=270
and: http://www.badscience.net/?p=261

Many of the commenters seem to know what they are talking about as well. (Just like another website we could mention.)

Sadly, the video's a fake. See http://www.badscience.net/?p=261

Oh, I'd be more concerned about them faking experiments completely...

Like you, when I see a scientist quoted, I often wonder "whose special interest money is paying for this guy?", but I look on http://www.prwatch.org/ and http://www.sourcewatch.org/ to find out if that is actually the case. It is unreasonable to assume that everybody is getting paid off to hide the truth. One problem is that the press report science very badly: have a look at http://www.badscience.net/ for some entertaining views. Most reporters seem to have little science background and want to sell papers, so misunderstanding and sensationalism rule.

"...to ensure that children have access to violent and or filthy materials?
Do you think that it's GOOD that kids should be seeing this sort of trash?"

Obviously, you don't believe YOUR children shouldn't. Doesn't mean everyone should automatically agree with you.

The reason this is being fought tooth and nail is because it's a stepping stone to greater losses of the so-called freedoms you americans face (note, author of this post not american)

"As a parent and a grandfather, I would not want my kids partaking in this sort of degenerate filth. It's garbage."

By your reasoning, so's most of shakespear's work.. oh. so that's written on paper, so that's okay? Right, double-standard much? May as well burn every library and start again with fresh culture.

"And don't get all excited. I'm an atheist so I'm not some religious right wing zealot.."

*blink* so that means you're just a right wing zealot? You don't have to be religious to be a moral crusader, it just seems to be common.

"I'm an adult and I know what's bad for kids. I've raised two kids myself, they are adults now and I'm happy to say I think they turned out pretty good and I had strict rules on this sort of thing in my home. I absolutely forbid MTV and such trash under my roof and it was NOT a problem, as a matter of fact my son came home from college last year and told me that he was glad that I had forbidden MTV type trash in the home.."

A sample of two is not a valid experiment. Come back and talk to me when you've raised about 30-thousand children, AND when you have a valid cross-section of lifestyles, living areas, etc. Your experiment is also loaded with bias. Read http://www.badscience.net/ for examples of bias in experiments.

Millions of children grow up with video games, MTV, books, porn, the internet, and none of them turn out to be serial killers, gang members, murderers, rapists, drug users, etc.

Some kids who have no contact with any of the above media still commit crimes of these nature, hell, they were committing these crimes before the media existed at all!

Statistically speaking, the fact that there's an intersection at some point between violent crimes and these types of media is just a proof that both exist in a random selection of people!

ash

PS, I find it entertaingly co-incidental (aka, an alanis-morriset style ironicism) that i was asked to reproduce the word 'gunned' to verify my humanity.

New Scientist often fail to cite original articles, and glibly accept press-releases as fact. See:

http://www.badscience.net/?cat=39