Entangled Minds

The National Science Foundation publishes a biannual report called Science and Engineering Indicators . It's a comprehensive review (588 pages in the 2008 report) of developments in the US relevant to science and engineering, including a section on the public understanding of science. I've been tracking this report for years to see how the NSF views what it regards as "pseudoscience." That word first appeared in its 2000 report. Exemplars of pseudoscience in that year's report included "yogic flying, therapeutic touch, astrology, fire walking, voodoo magical thinking, Uri Geller, placebo, alternative medicine, channeling, Carlos hoax, psychic hotlines and detectives, near death experiences, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, homeopathy, faith healing, and reincarnation." For a section of an NSF report supposedly concerned with the lack of critical thinking skills, this is one of the most peculiar, and as such inadvertently ironic, lists I can imagine. Surely it...

Elsevier is the world's largest publisher of scientific journals and books. One of the journals is relatively new, called Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing . Elsevier tracks visits to their websites to help rank the scientific impact of their 2,000 journals. In a survey reported in December it recorded over 1 million visits by customers who viewed 4.8 million pages. Elsevier also tracks the top 10 most-downloaded articles each month, and which journals they were published in. One of those articles was published recently in Explore, so the impact of that new journal is rising fast. I found of special interest their observation that the second most popular download for the September/October issue of Explore was "Double-Blind Test of the Effects of Distant Intention on Water Crystal," by me, Gail Hayssen, Masaru Emoto, & Takashige Kizu. So who cares? As I've written before, lots of scientists do. I see it directly because I answer emails from scientists al...