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Doubtful News Roundup for 21 December 2014

12/21/2014

 
Questionable claims, pseudoscience and monsters from around the world. 

Here are the top stories from Doubtful News this week.

Meldrum’s course on relict hominoids is a bit of a stretch  An Idaho professor is teaching an anthropology course on human evolution but something is VERY funny about this one -- it includes mention of the Bigfoot and Yeti, and not just in passing.

More news on Yeti -- explanation in a prestigious scientific journal is disappointing:  Sykes’ Yeti-polar bear data conclusions challenged

Hairless, toothy mystery carcass in Santa Barbara has a normal ID  A few times every year, a mystery carcass washes up on a beach somewhere sparking rampant speculation about what weird critter it could be. A hybrid monster? An alien? A mutant? It never is. Check out to see what a very normal animal looks like after death and partial decomposition. See if you can guess what it is.

From Alternative to Integrative, the NIH changes a branch name  NCCAM undergoes a name change, but the focus on nonsense hypotheses remains unchanged. Is this an effective way to spend taxpayer dollars?

Rid fat by breathing article is part of BMJ’s lighthearted holiday issue  Every year, researchers make the British Medical Journal Christmas issue a particularly lighthearted and humorous one. Unfortunately, journalists apparently can't tell the difference between jocularity and journalistic integrity.

Mythbusters inspire investigators to examine the escape from Alcatraz  Scientist speculate that the tides may have taken a lucky turn for the legendary prisoners who escaped from Alcatraz prison. 

Is the Elf On A Shelf a real spy? Your kids may think so.  Do you have one of those happy elves on your mantle or shelf? Well they creep some people out. Rumor has it that they are spies for the National Security Administration. Ridiculous? Yes. But your kids think their eyes follow them all around the room.

Visit DoubtfulNews.com for more stories everyday. Pass our links on via social media to spread the world about dubious media claims and what to think about strange phenomena. 

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    SWIFT is named after Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. In the book, Gulliver encounters among other things a floating island inhabited by spaced-out scientists and philosophers who hardly deal with reality. Swift was among the first to launch well-designed critiques against the flummery - political, philosophical, and scientific - of his time, a tradition that we hope to maintain at The James Randi Foundation.

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