I was hoping to publish an article from our Skeptic of the Year winner, Lee Traynor, this week, but sadly there was no room for it and so you'll all have to wait a fortnight to hear the fascinating story of when he worked with James Randi to expose some woo peddlers.
A few days ago I was sitting at home, re-watching an episode of Breaking Bad, when I noticed - during a scene where Skylar White was talking on the phone - that the audio track had a weird background vocal track to it. The vocal wasn't part of the phone call Skylar was on, and there weren't any SWAT outside the door ready to burst in on her - so the audio seemed a little out of place. Then the scene changed, and after a little while the voice started up again, which was odd. I paused the show, and sure enough the background voice kept on speaking - letting me know it definitely wasn't part of the show.
In July 2026, a curious announcement was made by the U.S Federal Communication Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB). They added two new categories of equipment to the national security 'covered list'. The second category captures foreign‑produced advanced robotic devices, including robot vacuum cleaners.
Many of us who grew up with access to a TV may remember long ads that flashed through scenes of shanty towns, dirt roads, dishevelled children, and emaciated infants too exhausted to respond to the flies landing on their faces. These edits are followed by a B- or C-list celebrity exhorting viewers to sponsor a child for as little as $1 a day. Sally Struthers' long partnerships with the Christian Children's Fund (formerly China's Child Fund, now just ChildFund) and Save The Children (which officially discontinued their sponsorship programme in January 2026) come to mind:
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.
Newshub published an article about an 80 year old picture showing a native american man holding something rectangular with flat edges. Although it conceivably looks like an iPhone 5, as the article concedes it's much more likely to be a mirror or blade.
Former accountant turned psychic took $250 thousand from an elderly couple in a rest home who had been friends with him for 30 years. The money was taken over a period of 12 years.
Alison Campbell investigates alarming reports on what is living in our dishwashers.
My brain hurts. I haven't used it in some years, so there's no surprise really. After managing to avoid external employment for a goodly time, a job has finally got its teeth into me and won't let go. Which is not to say I've been totally lazy at home these past years, there's been free-lunch work to do and projects such as the NZ Skeptic to help pass time. But all of these could be done in the privacy of one's own home, dressed in striped jarmies if the mood took and it often did.
A respected member of Skeptics passed away at the Hampton Court Rest Home at Taradale, napier, on 29 September last year.
It often seems as if home schooling is the domain of hard-line Christians. In fact, they're not the only people who feel that their children are better taught at home than in school.
Walter C Clark, Chuck Bird and Nicky McLean criticise Hitting Home for not investigating women's violence towards men, that is, for not being another piece of research altogether. When biologists can produce papers about the hairs on the legs of one species of fruit-flies, this does not seem excessively specialised. One reason that that was not done is simply money. To have achieved the same accuracy would have required interviewing 2,000 women, doubling the cost.
One of the arguments presented in favour of this year's Bent Spoon award was that the NZ Skeptics increasingly provide an early warning system against strange notions from abroad. For example, Skeptical activities helped New Zealand develop some early immunity to the worst excesses of the "repressed memory" virus. While many members supported the Hitting Home award on similar grounds, some members may have wondered whether Hitting Home was no more than a local aberration and that we were seeing international demons where none existed.