What, this is a thing?

A paper that made extravagant weight loss claims for green coffee beans has been retracted. This study had been touted by Dr Oz, of course — no fraud is to ludicrous for him — and rebutted by Scott Gavura, and I’m generally suspicious of any dietary supplement that promises weight loss without reducing calories or increasing exercise. But there’s one bit that surprised me. The study was done in India by a guy named Mysore Nagendran, and it was sponsored by Applied Food Sciences, Inc. (AFS), the company trying to exploit this Miracle Weight Loss Supplement. They couldn’t get it published, so…

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The ‘evidence from comic book’ argument against evolution

Well, he did it: the Digital Cuttlefish found a novel argument against evolution. It has to be seen to be believed — this creationist is claiming that the X-Men disprove the theory of evolution.

Already you should be saying “It’s a comic book and a movie! It’s not real!”, and for a bonus you might point out that the biology of the X-Men franchise is ludicrously awful, and in general, the mass media don’t understand evolution, but let’s give him a chance. Let’s see this argument.

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Jesus Christ, we have an “Ebola Czar”

All right, this is ridiculous. Obama has appointed an Ebola Czar. By the most pessimistic speculations, we might have “as many as two dozen” infected people by November — right now, it’s a tiny handful. But we need an “Ebola Czar”. We had almost 2000 cases of malaria in 2011, do we have a “Malaria Czar”? We have at least 3000 deaths per year from flu — where is our “Flu Czar”?

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Friday Cephalopod: UNFOLLOW

I just learned that the Blogess has “giant squid phobia”.

squidattack

Several people are aware of my severe giant squid phobia and lovingly (?) sent me this video of a giant squid attacking a Greenpeace submarine, and that’s unsettling enough, but WHY IS THERE ANOTHER SQUID BEHIND IT SPITTING OUT FIRE?  Is that a real thing?  Because I was scared enough without adding: “Oh, and also they can shoot a blinding inferno out of their butts like a tentacled, aquatic bonfire.”  It’s like half giant squid and half underwater maritime flame-thrower, and that’s not natural and is a sign that all giant squid are literally demons from the depths of hell.

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#BillNyeInMorris

Little ol’ Morris got that hashtag trending last night — I guess when essentially everyone in a small town suddenly starts tweeting exactly the same thing, it shows up as a bright blip in the data. It was an impressive reaction by the audience, too. These were college students who grew up with Bill Nye, and apparently even the ones who were too young to have watched his show when it was on the air got regularly exposed to episodes that were shown in the public schools. So he was welcomed like a rock star.

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