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When it comes to scientific or medical research, we like to believe the authors of a paper stand behind their work — but what if the actual authors aren't really listed? More »
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A group of physicians and human rights activist claim that the United States government used shoddy and intentionally biased science in order to downgrade what was considered torture to "enhanced interrogation techniques." More »
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British doctor Andrew Wakefield already lost his medical license over his faulty research linking vaccines and autism, but now a new report says his 1998 paper, published in the Lancet, was actually fraudulent. More »
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Roland Emmerich's 2012 has the worst science in a science fiction film, according to NASA's experts — followed by Armageddon, Volcano, The Sixth Day and Chain Reaction. So what were the films with the best science, according to NASA? More »
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Have you resolved this New Year to reveal your Theory of Everything to the scientific world, but aren't sure how to do it in a maximally off-putting and confusing way? In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll find out how. More »
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In the following essay, Jennifer Ouellette explores what happens when otherwise normal science documentaries attempt to give their topics dramatic flourish...and fail hard. More »
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Doctor Who shouldn't really be called science fiction, says author Terry Pratchett. It's "ludicrous and breaks most of the laws of narrative," he adds, in a tongue-in-cheek but fairly bracing critique. Guards! Guards? More »
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Jeff Fahey and his random scummy colleague have just a few seconds to get to their underground bunker before the Earth's temperature reaches... Absolute Zero! Yes, the temperature is going to be colder than space. But they can outrun it! More »
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Physicist Sidney Perkowitz has one simple request for scifi filmmakers: please break the laws of physics only once per movie. He insists this for Tinseltown's own good, as audiences' disbelief can be only be suspended so far. More »
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The debate over bad science in science-fiction movies has gotten a major new source of ammunition: Phil Plait, writing for Discover Magazine, has rounded up a fairly definitive list of the best and worst moments in movie science. More »
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On physics-gone-haywire show FlashForward, characters recently suggested that an accelerator in Palo Alto, CA might have caused a worldwide blackout that killed millions by conducting "proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration" experiments. Now scientists at the real accelerator in Palo Alto have responded. More »
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Can't recall which items the media claims prevent cancer and those that cause it? Kill or Cure takes aim at bad science journalism with its tongue-in-cheek index of items the Daily Mail links to cancer. [via Metafilter, Image from SMBC] More »
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CERN, home of the notorious Large Hadron Collider, threatened destruction (via anti-matter) in the recent movie Angels And Demons and (via ghosts) in a recent Torchwood radio play. But CERN is just one example of how science fiction demonizes science. More »
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A bevy of terrible contraptions have been concocted lately for the benefit of our breasts. Here are a few of the more recent "WTF get the away from me" over-the-shoulder boulder-holder gadgets. More »
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Click to view A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab - and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism. More »
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A prankster who submitted a computer-generated research paper to the International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering discovered that not only was his fake paper accepted - its "author" is to chair a panel. More »
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"My favorite science fiction movies generally deal in some really, really bad science. Laws of physics are regularly flouted. Aliens make no physiological sense. That’s because the directors are just using fragments of science to assemble fiction that reach down deep inside us, not to our internal database of scientific facts, but to our addiction to beautiful images and human stories. Science fiction movies are not really about science." — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine More »
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Turns out that the hard science underpinning Splice, a forthcoming flick about genetic engineering directed by Vincenzo "Cube" Natali, is actually not so hard. In a recent interview, the director claims his inspiration to do a genetic chimera movie was seeing a now-famous image of a mouse with a human ear grafted onto its back. "It was such a crazy, shocking weird image that I was inspired to write a story about genetic splicing," he said. Unfortunately, what he saw wasn't genetic splicing at all. More »
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Next time a scientist in the United States wants to use an ultrapowerful x-ray machine (pictured here) to aid pharmaceutical development, or the nation's biggest particle accelerator to study neutrinos, it may be impossible. The Argonne and Fermilab facilities in Illinois, two of the United States' most important national laboratories, are about to suffer funding cuts so deep that Fermilab reports it may have to lay off 10 percent of its science staff. This could seriously damage the future of physics and chemistry research in the U.S. More »
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Synthetic biologist and science blogger Keith Robison is sick of seeing advertising campaigns for companies that say "such-and-such is in our corporate DNA." So he strikes back by explaining what it REALLY means for you to have something in your DNA. The results are hilarious. Find out what Sony is really saying about itself in this ad about HD being "in our DNA" after the jump. More »
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Divorce is pushing global warming into the danger zone. Each time a family splits up, according to a study released yesterday, it creates a double-sized carbon footprint. And since global warming is causing a general rise in thunderstorms across the planet, when you and your spouse consider splitting up, you are threatening the world with shittier weather. STAY MARRIED EVEN IF YOUR LIVES ARE HELL. THAT'S THE WAY THE BIOSPHERE WOULD WANT IT. More »
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People give science fiction movies a free pass when it comes to bad science, complains astronomer and novelist Mike Brotherton: More »
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