You will notice the NASA ambassador interviewed in the video clip viewed the event as pretty minor and nothing to freak out about. But to read the article on this page associated with the video clip and you would think we’re all about to die! What’s more… The difference in tone between the written article and the video makes me feel that there is more to the story than meets the eye.

As I commented to fox news-All I have to say is, do your math people! When the space shuttle broke up in the atmosphere it was much larger than a bus, and didn’t cause devastating consequences for life on our home planet. The MIR space station was brought down and didn’t interrupt breakfast for anyone… Heck, we get thousands of meteors zipping through our atmosphere every day, some the size of basketballs to volkswagon buses, and none of them have been on the news.

You get one crackpot with a theory based on his own improper interpretation of data and and you’re ready to throw the doomsday switch into overdrive. Ask an astrophysicist if a meteor the size of a bus would ruin anyone’s day on a global scale. Try selling the news with the facts instead of the hype, and maybe we won’t be so freakin’ terrified to look up.

http://www.news3news.com/wpo4.html

http://www.channel7daily.com/

You may notice that every link you click on takes you to the same product page, regardless of whether you want to check the latest hockey scores or the local weather. This is known as a microsite or landing page. It’s a pretty common practice to have ads pointing to such pages so that companies can market their products in a more enticing way than a puny banner ad allows. Most of the time landing pages present clearly branded messaging so you know you have clicked on the correct ad.

In the case of the examples above, the landing pages offer testimonials for products that shouldn’t exist yet and try to convince visitors to click on links to “free trials.” Clicking on these links will result in the actual product page. And then the fun begins.

The site that the faux news article takes you to (http://www.antioxwine.com), actually claims in the fine print on the Terms and Conditions page that the product it is selling may do nothing for you at all (although they have complete faith in it):

“D. We do not warrant or represent that Our Products will provide You with any particular benefits, or that Your results will match those of others who consume Our Products. Individual results will vary from person to person.”

The product page is designed very cleverly and is completely legal. It has an almost hypnotic way of advertising one product while selling visitors another by confusing them with two completely different but similar messages. It talks about Resveratrol and ResVmax, never once claiming that Resveratrol is present in ResVmax. Their actual claim is: “One pill = approx. 1000 glasses of wine,” without actually disclosing the exact ingredient they’re pumping you with at 1000 times a regular dose. There is actually no nutritional information on the site at all.

When buyers place their order they must provide their phone number, mailing address, and e-mail address. The purveyors now have enough information to pummel you with unwanted outreach. Again, in the Terms and Conditions they claim (in legalese) that they will send your information to third-party companies and offer you no opt-out preference. Most likely, they’re compiling a list of gullible people and selling it to the highest bidder to use in shady marketing schemes. If you want a lot more spam, junk mail, and intrusive phone calls, then simply buy this product!

The “free trial” will cost you a paltry $3.95 for shipping and handling, but they really start price-gouging with their opt-out ordering plan. The extremely confusing ordering policy automatically charges CAD$240 per month if you don’t contact them within 15 days of placing your free trial order.

This company is based in England, so if the order takes 16 days to arrive, you will automatically be charged $240. If you don’t contact them to cancel the order, they will continue to charge you every month.

This is a common scam, but it is worth reminding folks to always read the fine print!

Rod Weatherbie and Lidia Shaw join your intrepid host Dave Noel in a news discussion from their homeland of PEI. Summed up… Cell phone towers don’t cause cancer! Scoffing in the face of popular island opinion, we explore the science that backs our audacious claim.

Show Notes:

Findings from a long-term Danish study found in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Conclusions: The results of this investigation, the first nationwide cancer incidence study of cellular phone users, do not support the hypothesis of an association between use of these telephones and tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or other cancers.

Show Notes:

Links:

Geophysical Electrophonics

NAET

Healing Light Sandwich

Corrections:

In an effort to ensure the facts presented in this podcast are as accurate as possible I’ve had to make some revisions to the original release. Please see the change notes below. The current version of the episode you’re listening to now is correct.

In the original release of this episode my explanation for the Microwave Auditory Effect was wrong. So I inserted a corrected explanation based on my additional findings.

Also, in the original release of this episode my musings about the 2 schools of Chiropractic were inaccurate, so I’ve removed that whole segment.

Credits:

Thanks to Jud Cameron for donating his place to record… and paying for pizza.

Show Notes:

Links:

The Tenth Dimension Video

Neuro Cosmetics Article

Where does Lithium come from?

Corrections:

One windmill can power 200 households

Bolivia is a presidential representative democratic republic

Wikipedia says this about lithium:
Lithium is widely distributed on Earth,^[18] however, it does not naturally occur in elemental form due to its high reactivity. Estimates for crustal content range from 20 to 70 ppm by weight.^[12] In keeping with its name, lithium forms a minor part of igneous rocks, with the largest concentrations in granites. Granitic pegmatites also provide the greatest abundance of lithium-containing minerals, with spodumene and petalite being the most commercially viable mineral sources for the element.^[12] A newer source for lithium is hectorite clay, the only active development of which is through Western Lithium Corp in the USA. ^[19]

I first got wind of this “miracle of water” experiment, after seeing a small segment on “What The Bleep Do We Know?“. A movie released in 2004. I actually bought into the hype at the time. But there was always something unbelievable, and ultimately untrue about a lot of the ‘science’ presented in this film. Let me just say this to all you people NEW to the skeptical community. Don’t believe everything branded as science and “edutainment” on TV.

Even though this is a thinly veiled piece of new-age fiction sold as fact. You have to admit, the cinematography and post production are pretty tight. That being said, let’s try to point out some of the inaccuracies in this short promotional video, shall we?

Time code: 2:03
Water is referred to as a “secretive, amazing element”. What do we truly know about this “element”?

Well for starters, water is a molecule, composed of 2 elements, Hydrogen and Oxygen not an element unto itself. Between 0ºC and 100ºC it’s liquid, below that, a crystal solid and above that a gas. (at 1 atmosphere). It can’t be compressed in it’s liquid form, and is a solvent for many gasses and other molecules. When it freezes it creates hexagonal crystals. That’s about all I know about water… there’s probably a lot I don’t know regarding it’s special fluid dynamics, surface tension properties and such… but to say that it’s somehow mysterious, magical and possesses some unexplainable spiritual properties is ludicrous.

Time code: 2:05
Introducing Rustum Roy! He brings to the table an impressive array of books and degrees, revolving around material sciences and an unwavering, self proclaimed understanding of “water memory” or Homeopathy. He often refers to the scientists who routinely debunk his claims as “homeophobes” (some of the comments on this article are enlightening).  He speaks with authority, but that doesn’t make his claims accurate or true.

Time code: 2:26
Some religeous guy named Kirill. Patriarch Kirill I to be exact. He’s the big cheese in the Russian Orthodox church. I’m not sure why he’s in here, I guess just to bridge the gap between pseudoscience and religion… Not much of a gap there. He is a respected authoritative figure with a lot of connections which is supposed to lend some credibility to this film.

Time code: 2:36
Kurt Wuthrich… well, he didn’t say anything inaccurate… come to think of it, he didn’t really say anything of substance at all. His resume is extensive though. Kurt is a Nobel Prize winner! I wonder what he’s doing in this film? It should be noted that a lot of the true scientists that appear in pieces like this are there under the premise of lending a hand in the scientific approach to the film… However a lot of them are shocked at the final piece when they see their own words, edited, distorted and messed-with, in order to give them the appearance of blindly agreeing with the very flawed argument into which they were originally trying to inject reason.

Time code: 3:05
Konstantin Korotkov, Mr. BioElectrography himself. This dude is a throw back to the good ol’ days of Kirlian photography. Since mainstream science has identified the existence of Aura photography or Kirlian photography as a well known phenomenon called coronal discharge back in the 70′s and debunked it’s spiritual claims, it needed a new name so it could be sold to a whole new generation of new-age believers. He’s all about life energy. In this short clip he claims that the strongest element of influence for water is the presence of human emotion. Although even in the actual video he’s really unclear precisely how the water is affected. (I thought that heat or air pressure are pretty effectual on water, but what do I know?)

Time code: 4:13
Ah, the star of the show, Emoto Masaru. “I hope to show people, through my research, that water has a memory of it’s own.” Born in Yokohama, Japan, Emoto graduated from Yokohama Municipal University with courses in International Relations, and in 1992 he received certification as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine from the Open International University for Alternative Medicine in India, an unaccredited institute with minimal academic requirements. With a resume like that… well whatever. At least he’s a doctor… of sorts.

Okay folks, strap into your skeptic pants, we’re going for a ride!

Movie claim: Emotions, projected from a group of people onto a flask of water, can drastically change the properties of that water.
Real life: How would you shield the water from the influence of additional emotions during the experiment. Also, what properties changed? Was it still wet? Did it still make waves? Could it still dilute things? Was the freezing point the same? Wiggly bar graphs aren’t evidence of anything if they aren’t explained.

Movie claim: Love increases the energy level of the water and stabilizes it.
Real life: The definition of the phrase ‘Energy Level’ is “the fixed amount of energy that a system, such as a molecule, atom, electron, or nucleus, can have.” Fixed amount of energy! Which means you can test for it. Love can’t increase energy and hate can’t remove it. It’s thermal dynamics, a process in physics that is very well understood and has been shown time and again to balance out.

How is the water “stabilized”, exactly? Does it change any measurable property of the water, or does it just make the wiggly graph go up rather than down? They keep referring to “radical changes in the water” without specifying what these radical changes are. We are presented with some crystallized water drops that look like snow flakes that have been allegedly “charged” with different human emotions.

In Emoto’s experiments, Happy emotions look like perfectly symmetrical crystals, whereas Sad emotions are half-melted, crappy looking crystals. But you only see one example of each. It would have been more compelling evidence to see more than one case of this working. Like a whole series of beautiful Happy snowflakes, and a whole series of crappy Sad snowflakes. But we’re instead presented with a very cherry-picked data set of one, which statistically proves nothing. What about all the Happy snowflakes that looked crappy? Were there any? You never get super clear results like that in any scientific endeavor, if they were following a scientific process you would expect to see some anomalies. But nope, instead you get an extremely clear picture that conveniently supports their initial hypothesis, no flaws and no exceptions presented.

What’s with all the secrecy, Emoto?
After doing a little poking around online I’ve found out that the bulk of controversy over Emoto’s claims aren’t the claims themselves, but rather, his lab refuses to release detailed experimental information showing how to recreate these findings independently in any other lab. This is a problem when claiming something as huge as finding the source of “Life itself”. You can’t just say, ‘Trust me, I found it”. You actually have to show people how you found it. Where you found it. What apparatus you used to find it. What conditions were present when you found it. What materials you used. etc.

Also, it’s a little telling that you aren’t presented with a bunch of “love” snowflakes, and a bunch of “hate” melty blobs. Instead you’re presented with a test bed of one each. Everyone knows you need more than one of any test result to confirm a claim, to ensure your test results aren’t just random. Not to mention that measuring the aesthetics of water crystals is a very subjective and one sided way to interpret data in an experiment. Leaving your findings completely open to the personal tastes of your lab assistants is completely pointless and worthless.

Instead of making multi-hundred thousand dollar promotional videos showing some of his work, it would be a lot more fascinating to see his full data-sets to see once-and-for-all that we are on the cusp of a new spiritual and scientific understanding of nature and life itself. Without a common understanding of the brief and physically unreproducible experiments he’s presented in this video, we will never know if Mr. Emoto was on to something, or if he was just drumming up business for his own coffers and fame.