Politically correct weather
As the weather gets continually worse, the Meteorological Office feels an increasing need to improve its public relations image in case it gets the blame. So the big initiative of…
Science
The mystery of the green stones
Isn’t it amazing what you can find just lying around? A friend told me about a field near my village where he had found strange looking green stones. I searched where he told me…
James Hammond – journalist and genius
The first commercially successful typewriter was the machine invented by Christopher Sholes in 1873 which – with its Qwerty keyboard – dominated the typewriter industry…
Can science be “alternative”?
Some years ago I published a book titled Forbidden Science (Alternative Science in the US) and came in for considerable criticism over my choice of title. People glared sternly at…
How close did Hitler come to an Atomic Bomb?
The disturbing answer is “a lot closer than you might think.” The received story of German nuclear development in World War II goes something like this. Hitler and the Nazis…
Is mind control fact or fiction?
In 1957, researcher James Vicary said that he had exposed cinema audiences of more than 45,000 adults to images on the cinema screen for only three-hundredths of a second –…
Did Queen Victoria have a German accent?
You’ve sneaked yourself onto a party of tourists being shown over Windsor Castle. You’ve tagged along, gawking at the grandeur, until you reach a back corridor signposted…
Webspam 2.0 – The power of numbers
There’s a timeworn story about an 80-year-old man, Old Joe, who regularly goes to dances in his town. Even though he’s old and wizened, whenever Joe sees an attractive young…
The Bible Code, Louis Pasteur and oil drops
In 1994, Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, and Yoav Rosenberg published an article in the respected journal Statistical Science, entitled Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book…
How the science behind climate change was manipulated
The central issue in the debate over climate change is the question: is climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuel and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?…