AIDS quackery comes to London

Want to find out how Africa’s AIDS can be halted without recourse to antiretroviral drugs? Then come along to the Society’s of Homeopaths’ HIV/AIDS Symposium in London on December 1. Speakers include Dr Harry van der Zee, a Dutch homeopath who runs The Amma Resonance …

Did Muslims discover America?

No. Of course they didn’t. How can I be so sure? Because no respected historian has ever written anything to suggest that they did. Good enough? Not for some. Worryingly – amazingly – one of those who thinks Muslims did discover America before Columbus works …

Columbia and the ‘power of prayer’

In 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a paper in which researchers at Columbia medical school claimed that long-distance prayer doubled the success of in-vitro fertilisation. Here’s the abstract: Does Prayer Influence the Success of in Vitro Fertilization–Embryo Transfer: Report of a Masked, Randomized Trial Kwang …

Academics don’t want to know about Islamic Creationism

Last night I found myself talking to a very senior Oxford academic about Creationism. To my dismay – but not to my surprise – she seemed to imagine that this noxious pseudoscience is largely confined to American fundamentalist Christian circles. Not true. In the 21st …