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.
Aires Tech is the latest in a line of scammy companies, going back to the 1990s, selling products that are claimed to protect you from the dangers of electromagnetism. Previous iterations, like WaveShield, SafeTShield and BluShield, have sold stickers that you apply to your digital devices, pendants that you wear, and totems that you can strategically place around the house. Aires is no different, selling “One” holographic stickers for your mobile phone, “Flex” pendants and “Go” keyrings to carry around with you, and two different types of device to cover your home - the “Zone” and “Zone Max”:
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._”
Recently two different mobile AI devices have been released, and given all the overhyping of AI these days they've fared about as well as you'd expect them to - which is not very well at all.
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:
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.
For Father's Day, my ever-loving family purchased me some interesting devices from Temu, including an anti-snoring chin strap. The strap is made from neoprene, and has velcro straps on the top and back, along with a harness that goes around your chin. The chin harness is meant to keep your mouth closed as you sleep, which apparently will stop you snoring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
From the hard to believe it's real category, we found out about a revolutionary product being offered in New Zealand - Vortex Water!
As Skeptics we're not very fond of scammers, and we often try to protect the public from those who would rip them off with dodgy devices and ineffective products. The video below documents a feat of engineering, a device that targets the problem in the US of people who steal people's parcels - and it targets them in a pretty funny way. Although theft is not really a scam, it's still enjoyable to see unethical people get their comeuppance - and it's mentioned later on in the video that this device has also recently been used against scammers. And to be honest, I needed a good excuse to share this video!
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:
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.
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.
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.
Someone in the US recently flew on a plane with a spirit level to prove that the earth is flat. Instead he demonstrated a misunderstanding of physics.
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.
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).
Next time you visit the US don't miss the Museum of Unworkable Devices, the brainchild of physics Professor Donald Simanek from the University of Pennsylvania.
A Sprite in your Spirit, a Bogle in your Benzine, a Fury in your Fuel, a Greyhound in your Gasoline. With acknowledgement to the oil company which, many years ago, urged us to "Put a Tiger in your Tank."