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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Far be it from me to consider anything designated by Oprah Winfrey as, perhaps, maybe, not always evidence-based, but I had always hoped some skepticism was in order yet consistently instead found Oprah viewers were not only ready to believe, they were willing to migrate to other shows and believe there also.
Politicians throw out a lot of anecdotes, especially if it is one told by a constituent or potential voter, so Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann throwing forth a story told to her that the HPV vaccine caused a child's retardation would be just that, a story. Even it if is a just-so story.

Except she's a Republican. And so academics have offered $10,000 for the source of that story.
A giant crococile versus a giant snake in a Colombian coal mine? It sounds even more awesome than "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus", except the real life version does not have Debbie Gibson.

An ancient crocodile relative, a dyrosaurid now named Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, likely gave the world's largest snake a tussle or two. In Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe the new 20-foot extinct species which was discovered in the same Colombian coal mine as Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the world's largest snake.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.

They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment.   Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.

No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
I don't like SpongeBob SquarePants.  I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or whatever city that show is down to now.

So when I see an article claiming SpongeBob is bad for kids and I may have a reason to ban that porifera from the house, it has a certain truthiness to it and so I let my confirmation bias run free.