Until this morning, I did not know who Peter Snell was. I was, therefore, somewhat surprised to see a large front page spread in the Weekend Herald getting all excited about a 71-year-old man having heart disease. It seemed to me to be somewhat reminiscent of the famous “cat stuck in tree” line. I was [...]

In a move that defies all logic, the FDA advisory panel investigating the contamination of Rotavirus vaccine with pig virus has recommended that vaccine use be continued because “The vaccines offer a clear public health benefit that far outweighs a “theoretical” risk from PCV (Porcine Circo-virus)”. How very reassuring. Not. PCV type 1 was found [...]

Here is a good illustration why newspapers desperately need proper science reporters: Major research finds link between multi-vitamin pills and breast cancer Women who regularly take multi-vitamin pills face a much higher risk of breast cancer, a study has found. The Swedish study, which looked at more than 35,000 women aged between 49 and 83 [...]

Remember those candy cigarettes we could buy as kids (now long ago done to death by the nannies)? I see there has been some fuss in the Herald about the adult equivalent, the so-called e-cigarette. The e-cigarette is an electronic device made to look like a cigarette that nebulises a dose of nicotine from a [...]

Yesterday Steven Joyce finally announced he was raising the driving age. Unfortunately, he is only raising it to a timid 16 years. Still, at least we won’t have the lowest driving age in the developed world and one of the highest youth fatality rates. I find it hard to believe that there is so much [...]

Once more the media appear to be wading in to the campaign to lower the legal driving limit for blood alcohol to 0.05%. Strangely, they quote the recent spate of road traffic fatalities as if this somehow bolsters their argument. This is simply lazy journalism. There is plenty of evidence that lowering the legal Blood [...]

Freakonomics cites a recent paper on road fatalities: According to a recent paper by Lee S. Friedman, Donald Hedeker, and Elihu D. Richter, the lifting of the federal 55 mph speed limit in 1995 was responsible for 12,545 deaths between 1995 and 2005. That’s about 45 percent more American fatalities than we have suffered in 9/11, Iraq [...]

Earth Hour is now over for another year. During this hour I made absolutely no changes to my lifestyle. I did not turn off all my lights and sit in the dark to express my dubious solidarity with a bunch of  bicycle-weilding arborphiles. Nor did I increase my consumption of electricity merely out of spite. [...]

Yes, I know it is almost impossible to fathom such depravity, but some pharmaceutical advertisers make unsubstantiated claims in medical journals! (/SARCASM OFF) Such is the conclusion of Ben Goldacre of the Guardian, writing on the Bad Science Blog. Goldacre is writing about a recent research article in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine “Are claims of [...]

The recent stunt by the New Zealand Skeptics Society might be very amusing, but it fails to add much to the debate on homeopathy. The skeptics swallow large amounts of homeopathic remedy to attempt to show its overall uselessness. Unfortunately, this demonstration is no more significant than an atheist demanding that God strikes him dead [...]