Episode #579
News Items
- Now You Don’t See It
- Piltdown Case Closed
- Black Hole Back Doors
- Cupping at the Olympics
- Other Olympic Pseudoscience
Science or Fiction
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Item #1
Science
After the 1924 Paris Olympic games, fencers from Italy and Hungary fought a real duel to settle a scoring dispute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencing_at_the_1924_Summer_Olympics
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Item #2
Fiction
Women did not compete in the Olympics until 1936. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_at_the_Olympics
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Item #3
Science
Olympic officials will soon begin testing for a new kind of cheating, gene doping. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-08/acs-dan081016.php
Skeptical Quote of the Week.
“Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny — and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).” ― Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History