The winter blues

Living with a ghost hellbent on messing with neatly hung pictures has become a daily chore for the Stony River Hotel proprietors.

Issue 115, 2015 | I have just read your editorial and really enjoyed it. You make a lot of very good points and, as a teacher myself, I can relate to some of the experiences that you have described.

In recognition of the Apocalyptic theme of the upcoming Skeptics Conference, Vicki Hyde looks back in the vault to 2012 to see what doomsday predictions we managed to survive.

Every second Thursday in Wellington a group of eager skeptics meet in a local pub and work on Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) complaints and other skeptical activism topics.

Truly understanding placebo effects (note the plural) is critical to science-based medicine.

I've heard it said more than once that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) 'does no harm'. I suppose that could be true of a healthy person using something like homeopathy, where the only harm is likely to be to their wallet. But time and again, forms of CAM have been shown to do harm, and now we hear of another tragic, and fatal, case.

Noel Townsley shares what he learnt at UFOs and their Spiritual Mission, a conference held by Share International NZ at Mt Eden Village Centre, Auckland.

Researchers from Switzerland and Germany have just published a paper in which they describe using brain imaging and a cool way of looking at sound, called the modulation power spectrum (MPS) to understand just why screams are so alarming. Rather than looking at the amplitude and frequency of sounds over time, the MPS plots the modulation frequency against the number of cycles per octave, shown as a kind of heat map. On this kind of spectrum, there is a clear zone that gives clues to the gender of the speaker, and another distinct zone that gives information about meaning. But there is also a zone that until now hadn't been associated with any function. In fact, it has been thought to be irrelevant to human communication. This region corresponds to a perception of sound called roughness, which is thought to be unpleasant.

Pheromones. I'll admit that when I hear the word, I immediately think of sex. That's probably because the first pheromone ever discovered, in 1959, was the chemical that female silkworm moths use to attract a mate. Since then, sex pheromones have been identified in many species, from insects to fungi to birds.

In 2014, NZ Skeptics had the pleasure of hosting the rogues of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast at the NZ Skeptics Conference. As they say on their show, here's a quickie with Bob.

One of my favourite podcasts is this seasonal offering from British skeptical activists and science communicators Brian Cox and Robin Ince. This is a BBC Radio 4 production – oooh get me! – but the podcast version is 10 minutes longer. As Robin says, “this show contains extra material which wasn't considered good enough for the radio.” In exactly that sort of way, Robin provides the banter and is the gleeful layman. Brian, on the other hand, brings it all back to reality, reining-in tangents and correcting any guest who dares oversimplify a bit of physics.