Daniel Ryan reports from the front line of the battle against the anti-fluoridationists. The members of Fluoride Action Network NZ and its spin-off groups are vociferous about the urgent need to ... (1303 words)

Matthew Willey finds it difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday season. It's over now. But Christmas for me is an annual ordeal. I loathe it. But even typing this admission, I hear the intake ... (1366 words)

Magnetic claims challenged Online claims that magnetic wrist and ankle bands have therapeutic benefits have had to be removed following a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (NZ Herald, ... (1234 words)

Martin Bridgstock considers a major work, which gives us all some astonishingly good news Most of us are used to being deluged with bad news. The economy is on the slide again. Violence has burst out ... (1650 words)

Mother 'died of a broken heart' after false psychic message The dramatic rescue of three women kept prisoner for 10 years in a house in Cleveland, Ohio, came too late for the mother of one of them ... (1343 words)

Stuart Landsborough conducts a small experiment which may land him in big trouble. I tried an experiment with my wife, but until now she knows nothing about it. I wonder what her reaction will be ... (692 words)

The Advertising Standards Authority provides an accessible platform for members of the public to take on the merchants of woo. This article is based on a presentation to the 2012 NZ Skeptics ... (1184 words)

Do you believe in climate change? Based on my past readings of NZ Skeptic of course not. After all this is the skeptic's magazine. I consider whether you believe in climate change is the wrong ... (473 words)

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In 2011, I gave a talk at the NZ Skeptics conference in Christchurch titled ... (1269 words)

… then there's little hope for the world, says Alison Campbell, who attends far too many meetings. Fortunately however, that may not be the case. I attend a lot of meetings; that's the nature of my ... (512 words)

Pictures don't lie, right? Of course they do. And they were deceiving us long before Photoshop made the manipulation of images almost child's play. Today, nobody would bat an eye at a ghostly image ... (1003 words)

Adam van Langenberg gives practical suggestions on how to run a high school skeptical society, based on his own successful experience. In late 2010 I was fortunate enough to see noted US skeptics ... (1834 words)

A recent UMR Research poll has provided a snapshot of what New Zealanders believe about a range of paranormal subjects. More than half accept that some people have psychic powers; on the other hand, ... (412 words)

It's not a hopeless cause to engage with proponents of the irrational - but some ways of doing this are more effective than others. This article is based on a presentation to the 2010 NZ Skeptics ... (2086 words)

Research at Victoria University of Wellington is shedding light on the often irrational processes by which people assess new information. This article is based on presentations to the 2010 NZ ... (2253 words)

Alison Campbell finds some claims about raw foods hard to swallow. I was reading a couple of articles about 'raw foods' today. This is 'raw foods' as in 'foods that you don't heat above 40°C in ... (572 words)

Eyewitness testimony is commonly regarded as very high quality evidence. But recent research has shown there are many ways memories of events can become contaminated. This article is based on a ... (1298 words)

Some fields that claim the authority of science may be in need of an overhaul. This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2009 conference in Wellington, 26 September. I have always ... (1960 words)

Alison Campbell looks at some words that cause scientific misunderstandings. I suspect that for many of my first-year Biology students, the sheer weight of new terms they come across is perhaps the ... (647 words)

Alison Campbell ponders the evolutionary significance of lolcats. Makes me chuckle when I think about it. Not just because Lolcats (www.icanhascheezburger.com) make me LOL (they do), but also because ... (389 words)

Some claim our society is too materialistic and lacks spiritual values. But what would it be like to live in a society that rejects materialism? Arnhem Land in tropical Australia has a curious ... (1942 words)

Waikato University biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell posts a regular blog on matters biological (sci.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/). Her aim is to encourage critical thinking among secondary ... (400 words)

Having recently joined the happy hordes of mp3 player owners, our household has been getting an object lesson in the nature of random events. For those who have yet to succumb to the charms of these ... (483 words)

When the Sunday Star-Times decided to survey the nation on how superstitious New Zealanders are and about what, Vicki Hyde got used as a guinea pig. Part One of her responses was published in the ... (1944 words)

Placebos may contain no active ingredients, but they have real effects on the human brain. This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2008 conference in Hamilton, September 26-28. ... (2648 words)

Annette Taylor learns it's not enough to have your cake, you have to test it too. The Yuletide has well and truly washed up at our place, much food has been eaten and we are still in recovery mode, ... (520 words)

Checking facts should be part and parcel of academic life, but too often it isn't done. The late David Lange opened his 1990 book Nuclear Free: the New Zealand Way with a remarkable story. He wrote ... (809 words)

Global Warming -- Where Should Skeptics Stand? Although I have been receiving free email alerts for a long time, I am a (very) new member. Among the goodies which I received a couple of days ago was ... (2218 words)

The Eugenics movement in New Zealand had legislative successes greater than anywhere in the world outside the USA and Nazi Germany Eugenics was a phenomenon that lasted for less than a hundred years, ... (2975 words)

Insecurities about water quality have led to a boom in sales of bottled water. But the health benefits of the phenomenon are probably minimal. We were surprised to hear recently that sales of ... (976 words)

The Swedish chemist Berzelius coined the term "organic" for substances that could only be made by living organisms and not synthesised by humans. His German friend Wöhler synthesised urea in 1828 ... (2659 words)

One of the memorable presentations at the 1997 Skeptics' Conference was David Novitz's assessment of whether organised scepticism has a place in a liberal democratic society. Suppose that we are all ... (2390 words)

Dr Mann's essay in this issue will annoy some readers, but it belongs here because it deals with one of the key debates of our time. A recent edition of the Times Literary Supplement carried essays ... (851 words)

One of the interesting things about the Skeptics is the wide range of opinions that can be found in our group -- not to mention the ever-readiness to express them. So I was interested to read Frank ... (371 words)