Here is a rundown of the mysterious, the weird and the wacky news from the past week courtesy of Doubtful News.

The theme this week was oddball happenings: A beaver attack kills a man, a giant wasp nest was found in the Canary Islands, a suspected dead hamster comes back to life and a guy thinks zombies are chasing him so he steals a truck. Bad excuse.

Sports people are superstitious and so, goat heads appear and freak people out.

Check out these cool and rather funny videos of an active plant that caught the attention of some bike riders.

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.  

The “No Compassion” Gambit (David Gorski) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-no-compassion-gambit/ Skeptics who question quack cancer cures and other alternative medicine beliefs are frequently accused of having no compassion for the patients. But they are the ones who are truly compassionate. Instead of offering false hopes and useless treatment regimens that diminish quality of life, skeptics offer reality and promote what is really in the patient's best interests in the long run.  

Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (Harriet Hall) http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/adventures-on-the-alimentary-canal/ Mary Roach, a hands-on investigative reporter billed as America’s funniest science writer, has a new book out: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It’s full of informative and entertaining vignettes about the digestive system, from historical misadventures to cutting edge science. Includes tidbits like this: men fart more but women’s farts smell worse.  

…Conference on Science and Skepticism, that is.

Yes, I’m back in San Diego after a week in New York City, where I served as on-stage host for the NECSS conference. This was our fifth NECSS – the Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism – and as one of the organizers, I have been thoroughly engaged with its creation and year-to-year planning and programming since the start. This year garnered our largest attendance yet, and the second time we had two full days of programming plus a night-before performance event, and although the official feedback forms aren’t in yet, the anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that every day in every way, things keep getting a little bit better. Success!

Not unlike at TAM, JREF’s The Amazing Meeting, the NECSS audience is a mix of both experienced skeptics and repeat attendees, along with a strong component of first-timers and those relatively new to the movement. We try to always have a few skeptics-in-good-standing on the program – in the past we’ve had Randi, DJ Grothe, and Joe Nickell among others – and this year we were pleased to have my old friend and colleague Michael Shermer, who gave a thoughtful and provocative talk about the extent to which science can inform our ideas about ethics and values.

We also had Massimo Pigliucci present his own take on similar issues, and then, echoing their online exchange some months ago, they engaged in an onstage debate of sorts, moderated by journalist Julia Galef. (No wagering was permitted, but next year we may consider arm-wrestling.) Julia and Massimo regularly collaborate on both the Rationally Speaking blog and the podcast by the same name, and so also produced a live version of the podcast onstage at the conference.

“A coincidence is like a magic trick. There is an instant tension between the thrill of an apparent miracle and the urge to debunk it.”  

A recent episode of the radio show and podcast This American Life was entirely dedicated to exploring coincidences. They ranged from the banal (seeing the same person in two different places in the same day) to the impressive (discovering your grandmother in a baby picture of your current girlfriend). The host of the episode noted her skepticism at the start; that she couldn’t help but remind people of the probabilities and statistics underlying some of these “miracle” experiences they had. But by the end of the episode, she too saw the meaning in coincidence. I did too.