General Science and Technology: Bad Science, Pseudoscience

Bad Science points out well understood phenomena which are persistently presented incorrectly by some teachers and writers. Some of the examples presented here are: rain drops are not teardrop shaped, the difference between the greenhouse effect and global warming, and heat lightning is just ordinary lightning.

This site has links to web sites discussing science and reason. Topics covered include: astronomy & astrology, creationism, health & psychology, religion & science, skepticism, transcendental meditation, UFOs and urban legends.

Devoted to presenting web sites by and about cranks, crackpots, kooks and loons on the Internet.

This collection of bad logical arguments and reasonings provides an explanation of each named fallacy with real life examples.

A collection of strange beliefs, amusing deceptions and dangerous delusions that contains mass media funk, mass media bunk, internet bunk, suburban myths and things that are too good to be true.

An educational tool for those seeking clarification and viewpoints on controversial ideas and claims, their library (click on the reading room tab) has links to free online articles on, skepticism, science, science history, pseudoscience, religion, social forces and pseudohistory.

Provides information and advice as the premier institution dedicated to keeping evolution and climate change in the classroom, and for keeping out creationism and climate change denial.

A Discover Magazine blog, Bad Astronomy is devoted to airing out myths and misconceptions in astronomy and related topics. It offers explanations for many mistakes in news stories, movies and television shows.

Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism. Their goal is to explain what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming.

Helps you evaluate what is good science and what is not science.

Evaluates the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of interventions and evidence used to support such claims, and for making informed decisions.

Physics in movies is very different from physics in the real world. This site explains why.

What should be done with something (Dihydrogen Monoxide) that causes many deaths every year when it is inhaled, and is also a constituent of many known toxic substances, and disease-causing agents? This site teaches that a substance with this intimidating name may or may not actually be a scary substance.

Some commercial enterprises purport to offer for a fee, services where you can buy stars or name stars after other persons. However, such names are fictitious, have no formal or official validity whatsoever, and are not officially recognized. This guide from the International Astronomical Union explains how stars are actually named.

Can we really mine these far away asteroids that are as far away as the planet Pluto? The fastest spacecraft ever launched from earth took 9 years just to reach Pluto.

A totally fictitious paper, a hoax, accepted as the lead article in the scholarly journal, Social Text. More about this at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair

A program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. Several of these completely nonsensical manuscripts were accepted at conferences. SciDetect, http://scidetect.forge.imag.fr/, an open source software program can detect these computer generated fake papers.

Related to SCIgen, Mathgen is a program that randomly generates professional looking mathematics papers, including theorems, proofs, equations, discussion, and references.

arXiv.org is the official pre-print server for scholarly papers in fields such as physics, mathematics, and computer science. snarXiv pokes gentle fun at arXiv.org by computer generating seemingly intelligently-constructed, but totally fake abstracts. A related website: http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/, presents readers with two paper titles and asks them to identify which one is real.

This article from the highly reputable Nature magazine describes scammers who have published hundreds of sham, nonsensical articles in reputable journals. Fortunately, most have been detected and retracted.

We also have some books on bad science and pseudoscience in our circulating book collection with call numbers (shelf numbers) Q172.5 and Q173.