…I feel slightly nauseous myself, having just used a Bon Jovi song title, but it’s perhaps the most one I could think of for this quotation I came across.
To set the scene: the article talks about drugs used as a legal ‘high’ — stuff like Salvia, amyl nitrate and isobutyl nitrate, which do not fall [...]

Okay, it’s a reference to The Adverts, and in particular their song about the spree killer, Gary Gilmore, who was executed by firing squad in 1977, and who requested that his corneas be used for transplants (which they were).
The Adverts released a song called Gary Gilmore’s Eyes, which was decried as being somewhat in [...]

I’ve got no objection to people who want to use complementary, alternative, holistic, wholefood sorts of therapies, as long as they can afford to spend their money on them and haven’t been conned into thinking that serious scientific tests have shown them to be worthwhile.
After all, these are now generally termed complementary medicines; they used [...]

Steven Johnson writes about something I vaguely knew about — London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854. This is the story of how it was identified that cholera was somehow water-borne, as opposed to the previous beliefs that it was somehow carried by the smells or miasma of the urban filth.

The commonly understood legend is [...]

I know a little about spiders. I know that they’ve got eight legs, I know that you can’t get spiders which would grow to ginormous sizes because they don’t actually have extensor muscles in their legs and they use hydraulic pressure to move ‘em, but I’m not what you’d call an expert. Also, I’d say [...]

Or, in reference to it’s previous name, the Hancock…
I thought it was you…

The Hancock Museum is near Haymarket Metro station in Newcastle. It’s been a Newcastle institution for years. I visited regularly as a child (mostly, I think, because every time I went, my parents would buy me a small plastic dinosaur to add to [...]

Thanks to @bengoldacre for pointing me in the direction of this truly interesting chap, Andy Kadir-Buxton. My impression is that Andy is either a delusional fantasist, or a true genius who has contributed so much to the world already, and could potentially cure an awful lot of the world’s ills, if only people would act [...]

This is one of those ones that I have to thank twitter for. If @brucel hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have come across Dries Buytaert’s post ‘we are small and insignificant’.
And more important, I might not have seen this image. You may need to zoom into it in order to really understand.
For those people who [...]

At least, that’s how the statistic was presented to me.
Christians more likely to support torture: God must be turning in his grave http://rly.cc/67ANF@bengoldacre
Only if you actually look at the research itself, that’s not quite what it’s telling us. For example, there are estimated to be around 2 billion adherents to Christianity (one third of [...]

I knew I would like this book. It’s the same sort of thing as the book Risk, which I loved, and Freakonomics, which I loved. It’s not so much a book, as a toolbox. In that sense it is similar to Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World: Science as a candle in the Dark.

A toolbox which [...]