Trippy or nauseating? You decide! Hit the permalink to amplify the sensation. (via @coseyfannitutti and @bengoldacre)

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, made headlines this week by claiming that video games gave children dementia. She later partially retracted the statement, but it's the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims about the effect of the Internet on children, including a claim linking autism to computers. — Read the rest

"Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance," a paper in Nature Neuroscience by Sander Nieuwenhuis and co, points out an important and fatal statistical error common to many peer-reviewed neurology papers (as well as papers in related disciplines). — Read the rest

Fine artist Penelope Kenny "explores the relationship between humans and other animals, especially in connection to transhumanism, evolution, hybrids and biotechnology." Seen here, "The Tree of Modified Life" (2011, screenprint, 100 x 70 cm). Dig those freaky hybrids! Penelope Kenny (Thanks, Ben Goldacre!)

This amazing photo, showing a woman leaping from a burning building in London, is doing the rounds on Twitter. It's hard to verify, as the website of credited photo bureau Wenn is down, for what may be obvious reasons. Some are claiming the signs suggest that the image is actually from the U.S., — Read the rest

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Celebrating today's 50th anniversary of the first person in space, two tracks from the LP "Yuri Gagarin: 12 Modern Odes to History's Greatest Spaceman" by London-based duo Guess What. (Thanks, Ben Goldacre!)

While visiting Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre's flat in London recently, he played me some fantastic cuts off a compilation LP titled "London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso In London, 1950-1956." This incredible music hit the global scene during the massive Caribbean migration to the UK starting around 1948. — Read the rest

This week's Bad Science column from Ben Goldacre is an entertaining and frustrating look at the way that the government manipulates statistics with help from a tame and innumerate news media:

The Sun said: "Police have charged nearly 150 people after violent anarchists hijacked the anti-cuts demo and brought terror to London's streets."

Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column takes on the new English and Welsh rules prohibiting the display of cigarette packages in stores and the requirement that all cigarettes be sold in generic packaging. While various people in the tobacco industry have protested this move on the grounds that it will make it easier to counterfeit cigarettes (a pretty thin objection, IMO), Goldacre points out a way in which this will significantly improve the public's understanding of the risks from tobacco:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts.

Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre looks at the UK government's claims that its health cuts and changes are "evidence-based" and finds that the "evidence" consists of bad studies and cherry-picked results.

The government initially claimed that UK heart attack death rates were twice as bad as France.

The TV people are winning at the BBC, and so they're gutting their online budget, shutting down 172 websites. Many of them won't be archived by the Beeb, left to vanish forever.

But one license payer thinks this is stupid. — Read the rest

The Guardian's Patrick Kingsley has a great look at the story behind Sukey, a networked tool that helps protestors in London avoid police "kettles" (when police illegally corral protestors, passers-by and residents into a small area and detain them for hours without access to food, toilets, or medicine). — Read the rest

Ben Goldacre's latest "Bad Science" column for the Guardian is "How to read a paper," a great editorial explaining how to critically evaluate scientific claims that are printed in the newspaper:

Our next case takes more elaborate checking, since it involves an experiment and its interpretation.

Welcome to the second half of the 2010 Boing Boing Gift Guide, where we pick out some of our favorite books from the last year (and beyond) to help you find inexpensive holiday gifts for friends and family. Can you guess who chose a Sarah Palin book?

The Brits have tripled school fees, to the outrage of those whose prospects of receiving higher education become ever more distant. Upon finding Prince Charles painting the town red, protesters painted his car a different color. Ben Goldacre suggests the opening of "imaginary gold mines" as an alternative investment in the nation's future.

Dr Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre sez,

A few days ago I suggested that the UK's protesting students could do with some kind of "anti-kettling app", to outwit the efforts of the police to stop them protesting, and keep them detained out in the freezing cold subzero temperatures well after bedtime.

Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre dissects the reporting of an experiment purporting to show a neurological basis for low libido in women's brains. Goldacre points out that the alternative to believing in a neurological basis for how you feel is to believe that you can feel something without having something happen in your brain. — Read the rest

The Geek Calendar is a cavalcade of British nerdery, posed saucily, month after month, with proceeds going to English libel reform. It's part of the response to the chiropractic association's long attempt to shut down science writer Simon Singh with punishing litigation over his writing about the more outre claims made by some chiropractors. — Read the rest

Dr Ben Goldacre is the woo-fighting science writer for The Guardian, and in that capacity he has dogged the heels of "Doctor" Gillian McKeith, a "nutritionist" whose explanations for the way that nutrition works defy science and delve into bizarre areas of Being Wrong, such as her claims about the way that chlorophyll operates in your pitch-black gut. — Read the rest

British nutritionist Gillian McKeith, often criticized for claims that run contra to scientific consensus, is engaged in an entertaining catfight on twitter with Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame.