13 October 2025
Donald Trump is no stranger to outlandish conspiracies or strange social media posts. But, by any measure, his post on Saturday night a couple of weeks ago was particularly bizarre. The president posted (and later removed) a clip on Truth Social of a fake Fox News segment with Lara Trump detailing the White House's announcement of the world's first Medbed hospital and a national MedBed card system (two things that very much do not exist). Fox News told The Verge that the Medbed segment, “_never aired on Fox News Channel or any other Fox News Media platforms._”
5 August 2024
Those of you who have been skeptically-minded for a while now may remember an Irish company called Steorn who had been promising since the early 2000s that they could make free energy. Back in 2006 they even took out a full page advert in the Economist, which used the Galileo Gambit and said:
5 February 2024
Making the news this past week was Elon Musk's announcement that his company, Neuralink, has performed its first implantation of their experimental Brain Computer Interface device (BCI) into a human.
6 June 2023
On the 26th of May Elon Musk's brain chip firm, Neuralink, announced that they had received FDA approval to launch their first in-human clinical study of a brain implanted device.
12 December 2022
I have a friend who I've written about before who, although she's always had pseudoscientific ideas (like giving her children homeopathic remedies), since the pandemic has fallen down the rabbit hole and is currently at the bottom of said hole, picking up more and more daft ideas as she sits there, wallowing. I haven't seen her in a while now - not since I bumped into her at the parliament protest in February - but I do hear about her recent high jinks, and I see her Facebook posts which suggest that she's given up any effort to think critically.
27 September 2022
In this day and age, with the internet as a handy tool, it doesn't take long for an offhand comment on Twitter or Facebook to become a rumour, and from there to mutate into a conspiracy. Sadly, much of the time these rumours are both extremely unlikely and very boring. However, the recent story about a stoush between veteran chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen and teenage newcomer Hans Niemann had me laughing when it was relayed to me at a recent Skeptics in the Pub event, so I figured I'd glance my skeptical eye over it. And now you all get to read my musings.
14 February 2022
It's funny how things come around. Last week I watched a fascinating documentary on the Bogdanoff brothers. For those not in the know, the Bogdanoffs are a fascinating case study - two brothers who became celebrities via a TV show promoting science, and then somehow bluffed their way into receiving PhDs in physics despite their theses being nonsensical in places. Many of you might recognise the brothers from their later years, where they used extreme plastic surgery to radically alter their look.
14 June 2021
I've seen adverts pop up recently on news sites, such as NewsHub and YouTube, that are selling a device which claims to be able to cut your power bill by 90%. Now, wouldn't that be nice - if it were true!
24 May 2021
From the hard to believe it's real category, we found out about a revolutionary product being offered in New Zealand - Vortex Water!
4 November 2018
A friend sent me a video the other day about a fuel saving device for your car. The video was quite well done, and like so many videos on FB had no voice over - instead having a soundtrack, along with large subtitles telling the story:
1 May 2018
I have wanted to get my grubby hands on one of these for some time, so on New Years day I went to Bunnings and deliberately wasted $30 (sale price) on a device that I didn't think would work as advertised. The product website sells it for $90.
8 October 2017
A couple of years ago I went along to a talk in Wellington about a new device called the QTB (Quantum TrailBlazer), now rebranded as a QSB - Quantum Scalar Box. Back then the device was made from a piece of sewage pipe spray painted black, with several blue LEDs around the top. We were told to believe that the device was emitting "scalar waves" (a pseudo-scientific idea) on the Solfeggio frequencies. I sat there for half an hour while the device went through a range of these frequencies, supposedly healing areas of my life.
1 August 2013
The widespread use of what are basically dowsing rods to detect bombs in Iraq and other trouble spots is a striking example of how a lack of critical thinking can lead to all manner of death and mayhem.
1 November 2010
One of the main reasons for the success Al Qaeda has had in getting bombs past checkpoints in Iraq is that the main device used to detect explosives is a uselss fake (NZ Herald, 24 July).