Czech president compares EU to Soviet Union

The Czech Republic's leader has long been one of the most strident critics of the European Union, blasting the bloc with withering attacks at every opportunity. Now he has inherited the ideal pulpit to air his views: The EU presidency itself.

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Intel's Cuts Not Enough for Investors

When Intel Corp. Chief Executive Paul Otellini announced an exhaustive review of the company's unprofitable divisions in April, rumors began swirling about scorched-earth job cuts to reverse sinking profits.

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Tim Kedrowski and his sons, Peter and Casey, are not pushovers for Bigfoot stories, but a frame on a game trail camera set up on their hunting land north of Remer has left them in a quandary.

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Faced with choosing a prominent figure for his Science and Society Masters dissertation, Phillip Stevens avoided the obvious. Instead of Kepler, Newton, or Darwin, Stevens chose controversial British biologist, and Perrott-Warrick Scholar, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

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I've debated skeptics, including Richard Dawkins (I spoke with Dawkins for over 90 minutes on camera in Oxford. He extracted 30 seconds from the dialogue and dubbed me the enemy of science.) and I am amazed that they mistake self-righteousness for happiness.

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The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works "on the same principle as a Ouija board" — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col.

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Welcome to the home of Carl Sagan Day. This November 7, 2009, we will celebrate the life and contributions of the great astronomer, author, and philosopher, Carl Sagan, on the 75th anniversary of his birth.

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SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) – Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad make people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

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About 90 minutes into the ceremony, Dr. Bunn said, someone yelled in the darkness that a woman had passed out just after Mr. Ray closed the tent door between rounds. Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray replied, "We will deal with that after the next round."

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Supernatural beliefs about mind, morality and the self are losing plausibility as naturalistic explanations gain traction. In response, supernaturalists argue that gaps in these explanations are evidence for the failure of naturalism.

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Just as I got bored of playing with the Simpsonizer, I noticed the South Parkerizor. So I thought I'd arse about with that for the evening. As blogger is a bit crap you might need to click the image to appreciate the full wisdom of the four Skeptic Park boys.

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Now, that might seem like a tautology. But it's not, not really. It's actually relevant because the antivax movement must change its story (what we skeptics call "moving the goalposts") every time they are conclusively proven wrong. That happens a lot.

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during the mountain's twice annual religious festivals, visitors come by the busload to line up before a row of small tents in a corner of the temple.

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A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics has taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial horns in a plane to ward off swine flu. About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns, called shofars.

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Remember the Hitler Zombie? He doesn't show up all that much anymore. The reason is not because a lot of brain dead Nazi analogies aren't being used to demonize political opponents.

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The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do.

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The ideal of critical thinking is a central one in Russell's philosophy, though this is not yet generally recognized in the literature on critical thinking.

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America in the Age of Anti-Reason

Prominent conservatives have recently discovered a shocking fact-- America is peopled largely by ignorant citizens who have a thin grasp of geopolitics, and seem particularly ill-prepared to engage critical thinking skills to make rational, effective decisions in what seems to be …

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If you're a Canadian, you've probably seen by now the story of Shona Holmes, the Hamilton-area woman who was on an American television commercial, telling the story of how she couldn't get treatment in Canada for a brain tumor, so she fled to the United States for treatment and w …

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We'd all like to help the police to do their job well. They, in turn, would like to have a massive database with DNA profiles from everyone who has been arrested, but not convicted of a crime.

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Exams for an Evangelical Christian curriculum in which pupils have been taught that the Loch Ness monster disproves evolution and racial segregation is beneficial have been ruled equivalent to international A- levels by a UK government agency.

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The Apollo Hoax?

On July 20th, 1969, man first set foot on the moon.

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A family in Saudi Arabia has taken a genie to court, alleging theft and harassment, according to local media.

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"The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don't cause autism. There is no controversy." So begins an in-depth discussion of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense penned by "SkepDoc" Harriet Hall in a recent issue of eSkeptic.

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Carl Sagan was a master of communicating the ideas of science clearly to a popular audience of varying degrees of familiarity with science and the scientific process. He died at the age of 62 of myelodysplasia (a type of blood stem cell disorder) in December of 1996.

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According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality.

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Simon Singh is a journalist in the UK; he writes for the Guardian. Moreover, he's a science journalist, and a good one who, like so many of us, prefers reality the way it is.

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