Thanks to the tireless holiday efforts of volunteer technical administrator Terry Heatlie, our server is back much sooner than we'd hoped, and looks to be running better than ever. Thanks Terry!

If you see anything unusual, please let me know at webmaster@randi.org. Thanks!

Reader "Troy C" shares this with us:

I have enjoyed your site for some time now.  I'm a former high school agriculture science teacher, and I'd like to share an experience I had with one of my classes a few years ago.  A local newspaper reported that a farmer in the area had discovered  a crop circle in one of his soybean fields, so naturally a crop circle "expert" was brought in to "investigate."  One of the comments in the article  made by the "expert" caught my attention: she noted that only about 50% of the soybean stems were broken off in the circle, and the rest were merely bent over.  That curious observation was one of the things that led her to believe that the circle was "genuine" - whatever that means - since according to her all the stems should have broken.

It's hard to keep bad ideas down.  With the recent publication of an NCCAM-funded study, Therapeutic Touch (TT) — where nurses wave their hands above their patient to manipulate their "human energy fields" — seems to be trying to revive its early glory days with a return to the petri dish. When Bernard Grad (McGill University) claimed plants fed healer-treated water produced extra chlorophyll, TT's inventor and NYU nursing professor Dolores Krieger set out to see if laying on hands could do the same to hemoglobin (1975). That launched TT's invasion into nursing as the profession's premier quackery.

TT would go on to produce over two decades of unconvincing clinical trials before young Emily Rosa dealt the practice a body blow in 1998 when she published the results of her experiment testing TT's basic tenet that TT practitioner's could detect the human energy field (now redubbed the "biofield") with their hands. (For a description of Emily's findings, see QuackWatch.

The National Academies of Science is one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world. As their "About the NAS" page states:

The National Academies perform an unparalleled public service by bringing together committees of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor. These experts serve pro bono to address critical national issues and give advice to the federal government and the public.