Nick Duffy is co-founder of the West Midlands Ghost Club (1989) and since then members of the club have been visiting the spookiest and scariest places around the region, using audio visual equipment, temperature recordings and trigger objects such as crucifixes and old coins to find proof of ghosts. The focus for them has always been objectivity and a calm and measured approach.So people shouting at ghosts and shaky-cam running all over the place aren't doing anyone any favors, he notes. Hauntings, ghosts and spirits are now big business and TV shows such as Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters have made both viewers and show producers desperate to find the paranormal, says Duffy. And it demeans what he is trying to do.

In the 2004 documentary "Super Size Me", Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month.  He felt terrible at the end of it, but it was for art. Fast food has a lot of calories, most people could subsist just fine for 30 days eating just one such meal a day - but even one McDonald's meal every single day in conjunction with two other meals can still lead to weight loss, says Don Thompson.He lost 20 lbs. in the last year despite eating McDonald's food every day - it's part of his job because he is CEO of McDonald's. Speaking at the At the Sanford Bernstein analyst conference on Wednesday, he revealed that his weight loss was due to getting his "butt up" and "working out again", his McDonald's food didn't have to go.

During the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which is a couple hundred miles from where he and his family live, Paul Bluestein stayed in his home while thousands of others fled the Tokyo area and many foreigners left Japan for good.  Radiation was about to create a Godzilla and he always goes for Tokyo. If you believe fear and doubt promoted with junk science.Not only did they not flee, they still buy as much of their fruits and vegetables as possible from Fukushima Prefecture.

Stephen Hawking recently declared that philosophy is "dead" - meaning metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that aspires to the most general understanding of space and time and other fundamental stuff of the world. Get rid of sophistry and defining into oblivion, learn some math and read some physics, he said. Pick any science and philosophers can drag it into the mud.Philosophers disagree and say just the opposite - physics needs metaphysics more than ever. 

A new outbreak of a hepatitis A strain rarely seen in the Western Hemisphere is believed to be associated with frozen mixed berries purchased from Costco. At least 30 illnesses are involved, including sicknesses in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada and Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend frozen berries purchased from Costco appear to be the source of this outbreak.

Carmat in France is getting ready to test a complex artificial heart that combines biology with machinery. The race is on to build a better heart and provide a safe bridge for cases where organ transplant is not available. Carmat's version uses synthetic and biological materials as well as sensors and software that detect a patient’s level of exertion and adjust output accordingly. It will be tested in patients at four cardiac surgery centers in Europe and the Middle East. Around 5.7 million people in the U.S. have had heart failure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Discovery in science means something different than discovery in common terms. Local people may have seen a snake for 500 years but if it turns out to be a new species, that is a discovery.There also many Civil War-era battle and camp sites that local people know about but that archaeologists have not cataloged yet - they are not in history books and so the sites have not been officially analyzed. In Civil War CSI: Did Stonewall Jackson Die From Pneumonia? I posted a picture of a bullet I found wandering around one of those overgrown sites in South Carolina that haven't been analyzed yet:

Two separate carbon-dating tests have confirmed the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225. It had been mistakenly cataloged a century ago as dating from the 17th century.The find isn't the oldest Torah text in the world, Hebrew codexes
known as the Leningrad and the Aleppo bibles, date hundreds of years earlier but this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna's cultural heritage department.

There were a whole bunch of protests against Monsanto last weekend - going after a company in name while really going after the science is smart politics, because it allows science media to rationalize that hard-core anti-science progressives are not anti-science at all, they just dislike corporations.And Monsanto is not easy to like.  But politics, as with likability, is subjective.  And when politics and science mix - as they often do in the modern period where government wants to control basic research - things can get messy for political reporters who are used to equivalent sides that are engaged in spin.

The makers of the uChek app, which analyzes photos of urine samples to give users quick health information, recently got a letter from the FDA asking it to show it had approval from the FDA or document why it doesn't need it.The FDA lets the entire NIH National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) get $128 million per year without giggling but this iPhone app is apparently a concern. How would they feel jurisdiction over an iPhone? The chemical strips which determine the levels of elements in urine become, when used by uChek, part of an "automated strip reader" and therefore a medical testing system that requires its approval.  Even though the strips are meant to be read by eyes.