The green coffee bean extract that he promoted on his TV show as a “useful tool for weight loss” suffered another setback last week when the authors of the study who made the original claims about it retracted their paper. The company that sold the extract has been fined $3.5 million by the FTC, whose […]
When the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow incident was re-hashed earlier this year, it was ugly, and several people who know I’m a Woody Allen fan asked whether I believed her or him. I told them that I couldn’t take a side because I don’t actually know what happened. Sure, I know her allegation and I know […]
Yesterday, I tweeted: I wonder how many people worried about being infected by ebola have been vaccinated against the flu they’re much more likely to catch? Gabriel Bell wrote at Vocativ: While worldwide it’s a true threat (the WHO just called it “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times”), Ebola has yet […]
Elizabeth Loftus is one of the preeminent experts on memory — particularly how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. In her talk this summer at the James Randi Educational Foundation‘s Amazing Meeting, she discussed her research into how we make memory mistakes and how she and her colleagues have been able to create false memories in test […]
In a Miami Herald profile, James Randi discusses how he helped Johnny Carson show up Uri Geller when the latter was booked on the show to do one of his mentalist tricks: Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, an amateur magician himself, called Randi for advice about an upcoming Geller appearance on the show. Geller had […]
Being a Woody Allen fan does not mean liking everything he does. The man makes a movie a year, and no one could keep up that pace and create a cinematic success every time. While his early movies like “Play It Again Sam” and “Sleeper” gave way to classics like “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” his output […]