With more than 5.4 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you’re throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or investigating whether your middle school classmate’s cousin’s stomach really did explode from mixing Pop Rocks and Jolt Cola. We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our…
Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say “appears” because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won’t tell us…
I’ve never been one for JFK assassination conspiracy theories. But I do love studying what movies the presidents watched. So while compiling the list of films that President Kennedy viewed while in the White House I was surprised to stumble on what seems like fuel for a new conspiracy theory. How did President Kennedy…
People who toss around dumb conspiracy theories and rabble rouse with large gaps in their brain are impossible to be sane and sensible with. Conspiracy theories are silly and fun to joke around with but to take them serious is just insane. But insane people exist! Here's how to debunk a lot of conspiracy theories.
As some of you may have surmised, I have a passing interest in conspiracy theories. As a philosopher, I am fascinated by some of the fantastical contrivances that slip out of the mouths of people like Alex Jones and David Icke. My fascination stems from genuine curiosity, with specific regard to how anyone could…
CNN has suggested that a black hole might have swallowed up the missing flight 370. Anyone want to get a head-start on debunking this in the comments before I tackle it tomorrow? This is too delightfully hilarious to not share the joy, and I'd so love this to be our first collaborative story on the Space subsite.
A conspiracy theory is floating around that someone other than Mother Nature is responsible for Atlanta's latest snowfall, spurred on by clips of people burning snowballs black. This video, using a lighter and some snow, explains why they're wrong — and explores the phenomenon of "snow that doesn't melt."
Here's an absolutely lovely bit of ranty, frustrated-scientist humor from The Guardian's Dean Burnett, that doubles as a smart explainer on the difference between true skepticism and scientifically vacant conspiracy theory. (Especially w/r/t media coverage.)
One of our more educated readers has chimed in on The Woz's Dancing With the Stars elimination. If he's right, let the Internet masses descend on ABC with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.
Click to view Why haven't we met aliens yet? And why aren't we sending rockets all over the solar system? There is only one plausible explanation. Earth is being quarantined! A combination of higher alien civilizations and our own Earth-based military forces are working together to keep the Earth contained and…
David Gallagher at the New York Times had to do some rumor control when a reader wrote accusing Microsoft of prohibiting the word "Tibet" in Hotmail addresses to appease the Chinese government. No "freetibet@hotmail.com", no "tibetsmellsofwetmonks@hotmail.com", no "ilovetibet@hotmail.com." Is this another…
This week's X-Files 2 release will have everyone wanting to believe in vast government conspiracies. But Cigarette-Smoking Man isn't the only shadowy villain by far. Authors like Philip K. Dick and Margaret Atwood were feeding us conspiracies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner before The X-Files was even on the air.…
Yesterday the United States Congress passed the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (GINA), which bans health insurance companies and your employers from using your genetic information against you. This is a major step in the right direction, but does it go far enough to prevent a dystopian, Gattaca-style…
Paranoid California readers, you can now relax thanks to Senate Bill 362. No longer can employers require you and your coworkers to have RFID chips embedded in your skin. If they are caught doing so the State of California will slap them with an initial $10,000 fine, followed by a subsequent $1,000 fine for each day…
