Breakfast on 1 recently hosted a physiotherapist advertising the Shakti Mat - a yoga mat covered in plastic circles, with each circle consisting of 20 or more sharp spikes. The mat is supposed to work like a bed of nails, activating acupressure points. I've seen the mat sold at shows such as the Go Green Expo, and have stood on one - the points are really sharp, and without socks it was especially painful.

It's always good to see people who aren't known to me in the skeptical community making complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. Dr Holmes complained to the ASA recently about a Sanitarium Weet-Bix advert for their new gluten free product. In the advert a woman says:

New Zealand's first flat earth conference has just been hosted, last Saturday in Auckland. Around 30 "flat mates" crowded into the Backyard Bar's function room to listen to conversations about how the earth is flat, including live streaming of speakers from overseas.

As we talked about at the end of last year, there's been a real push to sell Kangen Water devices in NZ recently. An article in the Herald recently has detailed Ainsley Brunton's efforts to sell the water in Whanganui to unsuspecting customers. Her water devices are selling for $4,000, with promises that the water can help with cancer, diabetes and other serious diseases. Enagic in Australia is selling the machines to New Zealanders who are passing them on, and Enagic's prices for a machine that does nothing useful to water vary between $2,300 and $6,500.

In the past, searches have been conducted for Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, using technologies ranging from men with binoculars to underwater video cameras and sonar.

President Trump will be promoting Dr Mehmet Oz to the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition, which is a little worrying. Trump's no stranger to making what look like very bad staffing decisions, and this one is no exception. Dr Oz is well known in the US, having risen from the Oprah show to having his own show. On his show, the Dr Oz Show, he's promoted so many nonsense treatments that he's been told off by the FTC and summoned to talk in front of a senate sub-committee.

A Napier based psychic has been convicted of indecent assault. Craig Wright, called the Spirit Whisperer, has been offering his services in NZ for several years, and has even worked on a pilot for a TV show with Sue Nicholson. Now he's been found guilty of indecent assault of a teenager after performing a "ritual cleansing". Craig's defence was that he puts his finger in someone's belly button to find out if they are possessed by an entity. When he asserted that the victim had this problem, he took him to another room to rid him of the spiritual attachment and that is when the assault took place.

Healing crystals have become very popular recently, with people buying many different crystals to either wear or place in their homes and help with physical and mental health issues, monetary problems and any other problem you could imagine. There are even water bottles with crystals in that are supposed to somehow "energise" the water you drink.

Dawkins has been talking to audiences in NZ, and a local pastor took to Stuff to complain about him in an article. Now, I'm not saying that Dawkins is without flaws - it's common knowledge that he often opens his mouth on Twitter before thinking about what he's saying, and he's no stranger to controversy. But pastor Geoff Robson seems to have gone overboard in trying to protect his belief.

Stuff had an article this week about personalised vitamins. Companies who require you to talk to a dietician before being recommended vitamins have been around in NZ for a while, but two companies have started up in New Zealand recently that recommend which of their vitamins you should take based on online questionnaires.

There's been some interesting local research on people with health conditions doing their own research. The Southern Cross Health Society has looked into whether people look up their symptoms on google before visiting their GP. They talked to GPs about their patients, and found out that an increasing number of them are coming into their practices with knowledge taken from the internet of what is wrong with them.

An organised group of homeopaths offering bogus treatments for autism has been written about in the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The article talks about how more than 120 homeopaths in the UK are part of this group, called CEASE (Complete Elimination of Autistic Spectrum Expression), and the therapies they are offering are supposed to remove "toxins" that are apparently causing autism in children, and many of these toxins are meant to have come from vaccines.

I was contacted by a journalist for the Sunday Star times a few days ago with some questions about Ken Ring. He's predicting an earthquake for June or July the 13th to 15th.

I've found another fun conspiracy theory - V2K. Weirdly, it stands for "Voice to Skull" and is a technology where voices can be beamed directly to your head. This is another conspiracy theory that until recently was new to me. The idea is based on the fact that microwaves can be used to create a clicking noise inside someone's head. This is known as the microwave auditory effect, and was discovered in World War Two by people who worked near radar devices. The likely mechanism for the clicking is that parts of the inner ear are being rapidly heated up by the radio waves. The microwaves can be varied to create what sounds like a human voice inside someone's head, which is pretty cool.

There's a new fad to put mushroom in your coffee. Claims are being made that these powdered mushrooms can help your health and wellbeing.

A recent poll in the US showed an alarming amount of disbelief about whether our world is round. The survey of 8,000 Americans showed that whereas the vast majority of over 55s are happy accepting that we live on a round planet, like all the other planets we see, only two thirds of eighteen to twenty four year olds are sure. The others either don't know either way, are not totally sure or believe in a flat earth.

The NZ Herald seems to think so, republishing a Daily Mail article this week about a lie detector test that Buzz Aldrin apparently took recently to prove that he believes he saw an alien craft on his way to the moon in 1969.

A while ago I was contacted by an older gentleman, Cedric, who told me over the phone that he'd heard me on the show and wanted to know if I was interested in a theory he has about the origins of the Māori race. Of course I was, I said, and after a while I received a self-published 32 page book about the theory.

A new locally made diet pill has gone on sale in NZ, and will soon be available in the US as well. Its makers are promoting the product at the moment

Tanya Filia​, who has beaten the odds and outlived doctors' estimates of her life expectancy, is now pushing for the government to subsidise natural treatments.

A fraudster has conned a clairvoyant, Maureen Smith, in the UK by pretending to be her on Facebook and charging people money for online readings. The scammer sent messages to all of Maureen's friends through an account that was a copy of the real Maureen's account. Things were going well for the scammer until they sent an invite to Maureen's husband.

Brittany Kara, from the US, is apparently a Christian author, NLP practitioner, hypnotherapist and nutrition coach. She's also an anti-vaxxer, and records herself speaking for a YouTube channel where she talks about her views.

The Regent Theatre in Dunedin is in the news again, as it's been flooded. This is unfortunate, as it appears that someone accidentally left a tap on that has caused damage to carpets and the ceiling. However, the staff at the theatre believe that this wasn't negligence, it was a ghost!

Kelvin Cruickshank, one of our famous local psychics who has appeared on Sensing Murder, has "helped" a family to locate the body of "Curly" - an elderly gentleman called Raymond Stirling who went missing in Hamilton in January. A police search had been halted after 11 days with no luck, and then Curly's daughter in law ended up at one of Kelvin's paid shows (at $65 a ticket).

A quack Chinese doctor from Australia has opened up a clinic in Auckland, to better serve his kiwi patients. Shuquan Liu will likely be selling his weight loss herbal diet in NZ, which consists of getting people to consume nothing but Chinese herbs for two weeks. The diet is an extreme calorie restriction diet (< 200 calories a day), which is likely to be dangerous to those who follow it.

7 Sharp have interviewed Marta Fisch on Waiheke Island, who has built an ugly looking metal box - three side walls - in her garden, to keep out "radiation". Radiation in this sense is the kind of electromagnetic energy that is used to send TV signals and offer WiFi, and also background radiation from nature.

The field of Artificial Intelligence is blooming at the moment, with companies like Google and Alexa delivering small, inexpensive devices to your living room for $75 that can listen to you talk and tell you the weather, order pizza and turn your TV on.

A Reiki meeting has been deemed newsworthy by the Taranaki Daily News.

In an article on the NZ Herald, reprinted from the Washington Post, Christopher Mellon argues that there is solid evidence for UFOs, and that the US are not doing enough to investigate.

The conspiracy theorists are out in force already after the recent school shooting tragedy. One of the survivors, 17 year old David Hogg, has gone on national TV in the US to publicly state that he's not a "crisis actor".

An Indonesian teenager has apparently "baffled" doctors by laying eggs. He's laid about 20 eggs over the last 2 years, and x-ray images show an egg inside him before he lays it. The x-ray image makes it unlikely that sleight of hand is involved - he's probably not pretending to produce an egg from internally, but actually just making it appear in his hand at the right time.

The teen, from Pakuranga College, wanted to wear the colander as he claimed it was his right, as it's religious headgear. This follows from the religion receiving recognition in NZ through people having driving licenses wearing a colander, wearing a colander during a citizenship ceremony, someone registering as an FSM marriage celebrant and a pastafarian wedding.

The UK Mirror recently carried a weird story claiming that there are numbers so big that they would create a black hole in your brain if you could memorise them. The title of the article is:

Liza Schneider has written an article for the BoP Times, printed online in the Herald, which promotes nonsense therapies for animals.

The ASA have had issues recently with the amount of complaints us skeptics have been submitting to them for dodgy medical claims. It appears that as a result of a particular complaint about an acupuncturist they've decided to write a guideline for healthcare related complaints.

An Australian woman, Shona Leigh, has publicly spoken about how she supposedly cured herself of cervical cancer with cannabis oil. This story seems to be popular in NZ because of the new Labour government's recent efforts to relax our laws on medicinal cannabis use.

Elon Musk's company SpaceX successfully launched their first Falcon Heavy rocket this week, after a recent successful launch in New Zealand by RocketLab. It's been a good time for private space companies.

Georgian College in Toronto has cancelled a course in homeopathy, due to negative feedback.

Companies in the US are selling "raw" water, which means the water has been untreated. At $50 for 9 litres, it seems pretty expensive for something that's likely to leave you sick.

"The results argue for more trials of the fish skins for burns", the vets said.

This story starts back in 2002. The winner of the NZ Skeptics' Bent Spoon award that year was Green MP Jeanette Fitzsimons. She won the award for supporting the idea of using Possum Peppering to rid NZ of possums.

As if people not vaccinating their kids isn't enough nonsense to deal with, there's an increasing trend for pet owners to not vaccinate their pets as well. This appears to be due to silly concerns such as that their pets might suffer from autism, despite the fact that autism hasn't been observed in animals.

Frank Hoogerbeets from the Netherlands has predicted a major earthquake of 8 or 9 in the first week of March. His predictions says that "electromagnetic amplifications caused by planetary alignments" will increase seismic activity, and that this will be caused by the alignment of 6 planets.

Scientology has been trying to get the public to buy into its anti-psychiatry ideas in NZ recently. The religion's branch called the Citizens' Commission for Human Rights has been visiting shopping malls around Auckland and setting up displays that seek to teach people that psychiatry is evil.

I'm in Nelson on holiday at the moment, and at a market today I saw a lot of nonsense - many bad medical claims being made about honey, jewellery, etc.

Britt Hermes used to be a naturopath. She graduated and treated patients in the US, before realising that naturopathy was all bluster and no substance, and she wasn't helping anyone with their medical issues.

One of the issues with fundraising sites like IndieGogo and Kickstarter is that there's a lack of adequate oversight to ensure that the products being offered are actually plausible. Sometimes things end up on my radar that look too good to be true, and at other times they're just plain ridiculous.

18 classes of health product are being de-funded by the NHS in the UK, including 7 that are blacklisted:

A friend recently contacted the OTO to ask about us attending one of their services, and last night we went to their Gnostic Mass in Wellington.