The following hastily scrawled letter was found one morning slipped under the door at the JREF Blog Department of Education addressed to “Any Skeptical Professor.” If you are an educator and would like to contribute to the Swift Blog’s series about skepticism and education, please contact Bob Blaskiewicz.

Dear Skeptical Professor,

I am a college student, and recently my biology instructor has said some strange things. The other day, he was talking about "all the toxins in our food and our environment.” He also said, "With all the pesticides in our food, it's no wonder cancer is now the number one killer in America, even more than heart disease." He also talked about the professor who was reported to be looking for young woman to surrogate a Neanderthal baby. He apparently didn't know the professor had been misquoted.

Desperate in Detroit

Here is a rundown of the top stories in pseudoscience, psychics, anomalies and oddness from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

The media does a fine job of promoting an idea that has zero evidence of existence. This week, it was spontaneous human combustion. Did a man catch on fire from an internal source? If officials can't find the obvious source of ignition right away, that option is "not ruled out". Hmm.

In psychic news, a psychic center gets robbed. They don't seem to be able to help catch the guy.

Here is a recap of the stories that appeared last week at Science-Based Medicine, a multi-author skeptical blog that separates the science from the woo-woo in medicine.  

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s cancer “success” stories (DavidGorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/stanislaw-burzynskis-cancer-success-stories/ The upcoming movie about Burzynski and his cancer treatments relies on success stories, attacks on Burzynski’s critics, attempts to justify billing patients for research, and a mention of a supposed clinical trial out of Japan that has not yet been published. Burzynski’s approach abuses the clinical trial process, and the patient testimonials are not what they seem.  

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: It’s Complicated (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/sex-gender-and-sexuality-its-complicated/ Sex refers to biological traits, gender to social roles. The distinction is blurred because we can’t always tell which characteristics are biologically determined, and there is no either/or test for male and female. Even the XX versus XY distinction is complicated by anomalies like XXY, XYY, XO, and mosaics. Sex, gender, and sexuality constitute a multidimensional spectrum with various axes, biological, social, and psychological.  

Homeopathy is the second most used medical system in the world, after real medicine. It is legal, and in fact enjoys privileged status in the US and many other industrialized nations. Most people, however, do not really understand what it is, or the fact that years of research and hundreds of studies show conclusively that it does not work – for anything.

Homeopathy is an example of 100% pure unadulterated pseudoscience. Its underlying principles are not only unscientific, they are as close to impossible as you can get in science, meaning that vast amounts of physics, chemistry, and biology would have to be rewritten if homeopathy were true.