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Planet Earth is not flat, despite what you may have heard on the internet. But maps of Earth are flat, and it turns out it’s very difficult to accurately represent all the features on the surface of a sphere on a two-dimensional plane. Many novel approaches have been taken to make sure, for example, Greenland …

The most recent Skeptical Inquirer Presents live online event was the series’ best-attended so far, perhaps because it directly addressed a question that is probably on a lot of people’s minds: What the heck is going on with this QAnon thing? The conspiracy theory movement known as QAnon has quickly gone from inhabiting the darkest …

For a planet without any known lifeforms, there sure is a lot of activity on Mars these days. Tomorrow (Thursday), just days after China and the United Arab Emirates have put their own spacecraft into Martian orbit, the United States will add its own rover, Perseverance, to the party, trying to land an object hurtling …

It is no surprise that a Supreme Court dominated by religious conservatives has produced yet another ruling that privileges religion over all else, as is the case with their recent decision striking down California’s pandemic restrictions on in-person worship services. But as CFI Legal Director Nick Little points out, the privileging of religion is only …

Homeopathic fake medicine continues to be sold and marketed by retailers despite the fact that it has no effect whatsoever on any condition or ailment, save for relieving oneself of excess cash. As the Center for Inquiry presses ahead with major lawsuits against retailers Walmart and CVS, we are also tackling the issue of the …

In 2015, a celebrated secularist writer and ally of CFI, Avijit Roy, was attacked at a book fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh, by a gang of Islamic extremists who hacked him to death with machetes and badly injured his wife, Bonya Ahmed. That horrific event began a slew of similar killings over the next few years and …

The Biden administration has re-established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which, on its face, is not exactly thrilling news to the nonreligious community. But at the very least, it is being headed once again by its director under President Obama, Melissa Rogers, who worked very well with secular organizations such as …

Behind the magazine, there is the man. On Tuesday night, the skeptic community had a chance to look behind the cover of the foundational publication of the skeptic movement with a one-on-one chat with Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine since 1976. His conversation with CFI Insider host Melissa Myers is now available to watch online …

Millions of doses of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines are making their way across the country, but still far too many Americans are unwilling to be vaccinated, whether they are staunch anti-vaxxers, driven by misinformation, or simply hesitant or scared. Claudia Wallis at Scientific American collects some evidence-based methods for overcoming vaccine fears. We’re doing our part, too. CFI’s …

With the appointment of a new director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, President Biden is also elevating the position to the cabinet level. (In contrast, President Trump left this position vacant for a year and a half.) Biden will nominate Eric S. Lander, currently the director of the Broad Institute of …

We know the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was driven in large part by conspiracy theories, manufactured to convince a particular group of Americans that dark forces were aligning to rob them of their power and influence. (In order to operate large-scale Satanic child-slavery cartels, enabled by Bill Gates and 5G signals, maybe with the help …

Today, the new administration is set to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty among almost 200 nations to combat global warming. President Trump, who had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” announced the United States’s withdrawal from the agreement early in his term, making the U.S. one of only three countries to …