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SKEPTIC 24.2

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In this issue: The SkepDoc: Laser Therapy: Hope or Hype and Hokum? • The Gadfly: The Sisyphean Challenges of Skepticism or, Start by Disbelieving • Pterosaur Thunderbird: The Origin of a Fake Native American Legend with an Antievolution Agenda • Conversations with My Dead Mother: Why We See Signs and Omens in Everyday Events • Is Cousin Marriage Dangerous? • Therapeutic Touch Redux: Twenty Years After the “Emily Event” Energy Therapies Live on Through Bad Science • What Can Science Learn from Religion? Steven Pinker on Religious Beliefs and Rituals • Becoming Fantastic: Why People Embellish Already Accomplished Lives with Incredible Tales of UFOs and Other Phenomena • 1984 in 2019: The New Privacy Threat from China’s Social Credit Surveillance System • Michael Shermer v. Brian Huffling: Is the Reality of Evil Good Evidence Against the Christian God? • Graham Hancock’s America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization reviewed by Jason Colavito • Junior Skeptic # 71 — The Colossal Case of the Cardiff Giant: One of America’s Greatest Hoaxes.

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JUNIOR SKEPTIC # 71

The Colossal Case of the Cardiff Giant: One of America’s Greatest Hoaxes

This is a story of gigantic proportions! Once upon a time, America buzzed with claims that the remains of a giant had been dug up from a field in New York state. It was over ten feet tall and made entirely of stone. Amazed onlookers said this was the fossilized body of a colossal human being. Could this be true? Was America once home to a lost race of giants? Or was this a whopper too big to swallow? Let’s find out!

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Junior Skeptic # 71

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Junior Skeptic — an engagingly illustrated science and critical thinking publication for younger readers (and the young at heart) — is physically bound inside each and every issue of Skeptic magazine. A dozen back issues are also available as single downloadable PDFs at an amazing price!

SCIENCE SALON # 70

Dr. Brian Keating — Losing the Nobel Prize

Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor (book cover)
A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor

In this wide-ranging conversation Science Salon host Dr. Michael Shermer speaks with cosmologist and inventor of the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment Dr. Brian Keating about the following topics:

  • how he almost won the Nobel Prize for his research that confirmed the inflationary model of the Big Bang
  • the problems with the Nobel Prize as it is currently structured, such as its limitation to only three people (when modern experiments are typically directed by a great many more); that it can’t be awarded posthumously (thereby neglecting people like Amos Tversky, who did as much work as his Nobel Prize-winning collaborator Daniel Kahneman); its neglect of many women scientists as deserving of the prize as their male counterparts, and especially how it distorts incentives to collaborate in science
  • his upbringing and what inspired him to probe the deepest questions about the nature of the cosmos and reality
  • what it’s like conducting research in the harsh conditions at the South Pole
  • what banged in the Big Bang and what there was before the Big Bang
  • the possibility (or not) of a multiverse model and a cyclical model of universes outside of, or before, our universe
  • the relationship between science and religion and why they need not always be in conflict
  • his Prager U video on why believing in the multiverse takes as much faith as believing in God.

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This Science Salon was recorded on May 21, 2019. We apologize for the very poor audio-video quality of this recording.

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