Skeptical Inquirer
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For a fast-growing number of discriminating persons, the Skeptical Inquirer is a welcome breath of fresh air, separating fact from myth in the flood of occultism and pseudoscience on the scene today. This dynamic magazine, published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, tells you what the scientific community knows about claims of the paranormal, as opposed to the sensationalism often..
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Summer is here, and shenanigans abound. In our cover story, Nick Tiller dives into superstition and pseudoscience used by Olympic athletes. As a former physiologist for the British Olympic Center, Tiller provides the perfect guide to watching the summer Games. Compete against your family in being the first to spot colorful tape adorning the athletes ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Milo of Croton once outwrestled a lion. On another occasion, he tied a cord around his head and snapped the band using only the bulging veins in his temples. He drank ox blood for fuel and ate raw flesh to scare his rivals. Born in the sixth century BCE (no prizes for guessing where) and ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Faith healing and other “gifts” allegedly bestowed upon the faithful through preternatural means have long been examined by the skeptical community. For example, in his book The Faith Healers (1989), James Randi provides a comprehensive examination of faith healing and offers several keen insights into the subject. While skeptics have uncovered fraud and deception in ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Carcharocles megalodon (or, more recently, Otodus megalodon) was a carnivorous shark that made today’s largest great whites look puny. The notion that the mighty megalodon shark might be alive today is a popular one, as shown by the success of the 2018 movie The Meg and its recent sequel, Meg 2: The Trench. This idea ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Besides the pandemic’s academic toll—seen, for example, in math and reading scores that have dropped to the lowest levels in decades (Mervosh 2022; Goldstein 2023)—there’s also the psychological toll. Surveys suggest that high numbers of students are anxious and depressed and that many have fallen behind in emotional development (see, e.g., Miller and Pallaro 2022; Richtel 2022 ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Archaeologists use the term serpopard to denote a cat with an exaggerated neck, a motif that appears occasionally on ancient Sumerian and Egyptian artifacts. The term combines the words serpent and leopard. The former is a reference to the snake-like neck, and the latter acknowledges that apart from the neck, the animal is one of ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Most readers of this magazine probably agree that homeopathy is a placebo therapy. Its assumptions fly in the face of science, its remedies are normally devoid of active ingredients, and the evidence from clinical trials is uniformly negative (Ernst 2016). Hold on—this is not entirely correct; there are plenty of clinical trials of homeopathy that ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
Never let facts get in the way of a good story. —author unknown Since 2019, journalist Scott Pelley has broadcast several segments for the CBS News magazine 60 Minutes on the so-called mystery of “Havana Syndrome”—an array of health complaints reported by American diplomats and intelligence officers since late 2016 that have been attributed to a directed energy weapon. Each of ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
1M ago
On April 19, 2024, CSI Fellow Daniel Dennett passed away at age eighty-two. He was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, an original thinker, and certainly someone who didn’t shy from controversy. I met Dennett many years ago, and though we didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on ..read more
Skeptical Inquirer
3M ago
Rumors of impending artificial intelligence (AI) doom got you down? Take heart, there may be light at the end of this tunnel—and not all of it from the headlight of a self-driving locomotive. No, sorry, you can’t be sure that a precocious bundle of algorithms won’t take your job (Cao 2023; Georgieva 2024). There is ..read more