Science

COVID-19 has claimed nearly three million lives around the world, but the virus didn’t do it alone. Peter Hotez, Baylor College professor of pediatrics and molecular virology, writes at Scientific American that responsibility for the mass death of the pandemic can be pinned on antiscience, the movement that rejects mainstream science in favor of “unproven …

Science gives us hope, but the danger of science-denial has been made startlingly clear during the coronavirus era of this larger post-truth epoch. So we turn once again to Richard Dawkins to mount a spirited defense of science as the best means we have of arriving at the truth. “What is profoundly troubling … is …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

With the publication of his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins brought fresh clarity to Darwin’s big idea, reframing our understanding of evolution by natural selection by focusing on the gene, not the individual organism, as the primary unit of evolution. In a new video, the YouTube channel Stated Clearly illustrates this idea with its latest animation, …

We know that vaccines are safe and that they most certainly do not cause autism, but of course the welcome introduction of COVID-19 vaccines also heralds a new wave of anti-vaxxer misformation and scaremongering. A recent NBC News piece by Dr. Lior Brimberg of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research dismantles the absurd and utterly …