Prior to its closure, the journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine retracted hundreds of papers due to concerns over their validity.
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Who’s afraid for Naomi Wolf? The fall of a feminist icon into a conspiracist rabbithole

Throughout the pandemic, writer Naomi Wolf fell from feminist icon and public intellectual, to conspiracy theorist and talking head of the right-wing media ecosystem

In the era of AI, cognitive biases are not exclusive to humans

Far from being capable of objective judgements, AI and machine learning replicate the biases and prejudices of the very human data they're trained on.

From the archives: The power of the publisher

From the archives in 1993, Wendy Grossman on the responsibility of publishers whose stable of content spans from the scientific to the preposterous.

Lost in translation: why most longevity breakthroughs don’t become therapies

From calorie restriction to enzyme supplements, longevity hackers are often quick to jump on the latest research - but over time, it fails to hold up.

Learning about science and statistics through pseudoscience

Evaluating claims of ESP and other psi abilities can provide the perfect opportunity to grapple with some counterintuitive, but incredibly important, maths.

From the archives: A healthy dose of sarsaparilla – snake oil for the nineties 

From the archives in 1993, Jerome Cosyn compares the flagrant snake oil of old with our enlightened times, and asks how much has really changed.

Smoke and mirrors: violent media, cigarettes, and shaky statistics

Is violent media as closely linked to aggression as smoking is to lung cancer? Only if you take at face value heavily cherry-picked research.

Gen Z don’t really think they’re psychic – at least no more so than their elders

New "research" suggests that a third of Gen Z believe they have psychic intuition – based on an online survey with deep methodological flaws.

The demons of Varginha: The cultural context behind Brazil’s famous UFO case

In 1996, three girls claimed to see a strange creature in the Jardim Andere neighbourhood of Varginha, Brazil, kicking off a now-legendary UFO story.

From the archives: A Test for Reincarnation 

From the archives in 1993, Val Dobson proposes a practical method for checking whether claims of past lives and reincarnation really stand up.

How a very wrong Royal horoscope put astrology on the map in Britain

Astrology really found its foothold in Britain in 1930, when the Sunday Express began to publish astrological predictions for the new-born Princess Margaret.
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