324 - Telekinesis

1. Incredible Through the late seventies, a young man named James Hydrick rose to international fame by using his enormous psychic abilities to move pencils and book pages without physically touching them. By the early eighties he was touted as one of the world's leading psychics when he made an appearance on the popular television show That's Incredible.

2. Defined In case you don't know, telekinesis or psychokinesis is defined as "the apparent production of motion in objects (as by a spiritualistic medium) without contact or other physical means."

3. Bunk Hot on the heels of his appearance on That's Incredible, Bob Barker invited Hydrick to be a guest on his variety show That's My Line. Barker was skeptical, so he also invited professional debunker James Randi to be a part of the program. Hydrick performed his page-turning feat successfully but his powers mysteriously failed him when Randi added a simple control to the experiment.

4. Confessions Shortly after his disastrous appearance on That's My Line, Hydrick revealed to investigative journalist, Dan Korem, that he was not actually psychic but that he had put his years in prison to good use by practicing a technique of blowing currents of air imperceptibly from his mouth to cause light objects to move. The video of his confession can be purchased from International Focus Press.

5. Testy So, even though there is no actual evidence that psychokinesis has any basis in reality, you might still believe it is real. Here's your chance to see for yourself if you have any psychic powers yourself. This telekinesis test produces a series of random ones and zeros. Probability suggests that average occurrence of either digit should be about equal. By concentrating on one number or the other see if you can influence a statistically improbable amount of that number to appear.

214 - with Links!

1. Fraud It is being reported by a lot of websites and blogs that Sylvia Browne has been caught in another in an ever growing list of "psychic errors." In 2003, she calously reported that a recently missing boy, Shawn Hornbeck was dead. You probably have heard that Shawn was reunited with his family on January 13th.

2. Jungle Girl The BBC is reporting on a "half-human and half-animal" Cambodian girl who has been living in the wild for the the past 19 years. The article is woefully lacking in details and seems sketchy for some reason.

3. Bass Diddley Bow I'm not entirely sure what The Ministry of Hope is all about, but damn, these are some talented kids playing awesome homemade instruments.

4. Welcome Back When Lewis Hill returned home to East St. Lewis from vacation he was surprised to find that the city had demoloshed his home. Another unfortunately, sketchy article without a lot of information and absolutely no input from the city about their side of the story.

5. Internet Justice Be careful about what you say to people in internet chatrooms. Painting by Tim Nyberg.

180 - Sylvia Browne

1. Dead Boyfriend Sylvia Browne is a TV psychic like John Edward. If she doesn't have any real supernatural powers (and she doesn't,) then the way she preys on people during the most emotionally vulnerable times in their lives in order to make money and mislead the public is utterly disgusting.

2. West Virginia Miners One of her techniques, like all psychics, is cold reading. But her main technique is to just make a bunch of random statements as if they were facts and then make up some bullshit explanation when her predictions are proven wrong.

3. Missing Child After seeing the huge number of clearly, unmistakably wrong predictions, I can't believe that anyone, anywhere can believe that she is legitimate.

4. Dead Daughter In some of these videos, Sylvia can't even justify her errors. But Montell Williams is such a faithful believer in her bunk that he actually steps forward and makes excuses for her mistakes.

5. Securities Fraud It seems like a lot of psychics have a criminal history. Sylvia is no different. She is also a blatant liar. If you happen to be a believer in Sylvia Browne's "abilities," please rethink your position.

103 - Research

1. Telephone Telepathy The media has run with this story about a scientist proving that people can predict the caller when the telephone rings. In fact, Rupert Sheldrake's experiment is nothing more than a 1 in 4 guessing game and his hit rate of 45% is meaningless when using a small sample group of only 63 people.

2. Lab Rats Seeing some of these freaky animals can be disturbing without some background on the reasons why they were developed. I highly recommend listening to this Skepticality interview with Marc Zimmer which illuminates clearly why glow in the dark pigs are more than just really cool.

3. However A chicken with four legs can be a bit disturbing, because it appeared randomly and we have no way of knowing why or how the extra legs appeared. Certainly it was a sort of mutation, but what caused that mutation to occur?

4. Cannibalisaur Based on petrified stomach contents, paleontologists have bee maligning the Coelophysis for decades, calling him a cannibal. New research shows that those contents were not other Coelophysis, but more likely crocodile.

5. Pale Blue Orb An image transmitted by the Cassini deep space probe, shows us what the Earth looks like from within the rings of Saturn.

083 - with Links!

1. Super This is a pretty long download, but you'll need to see the high resolution version of this TV advertisement to appreciate how awesome it is.

2. I'll Take $1 Million Worth of Lottery Tickets They all said that Austrailian dude was lucky, .

3. Pictograms Thank the U.S. government for making it easier to create fake road signs.

4. The Envelope Please How to do psychic billet reading just like Carnac the Magnificent.

5. Puppet Show Canadian web design firm, Dotboom has an online show about its most interesting employees.

016 - Conspiracy

1. Project Jennifer Howard Hughes told the world he built the giant barge Glomar Explorer for undersea mining. In fact it was designed in conjunction with the CIA in order to raise a sunken Russian submarine holding nuclear warheads. The mission was not entirely successful.

2. Operation Mincemeat During WW2, British Naval Intelligence threw a dead body into the ocean off the coast of Nazi occupied Spain. What the Germans learned from the papers carried by the dead man contributed to their eventual defeat.

3. Lord of Light Ex-CIA operative Antonio Mendez explains how a fake Hollywood movie based on Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light allowed hostages to be removed from Iran. A clip from Eroll Morris' great documentary series, First Person.

4. Them Author Jon Ronson has spent a lot of time hanging around with extremists, from the Taliban to the Klan. Even with all their different beliefs, these people shares one thing in common; hatred of the Bilderberg Group, an elite bunch of world leaders that meets once a year to decide the fates of the rest of us.

5. MKultra From 1950 to 1975, the US government performed thousands of illegal experiments on its own citizens. The were trying to develop a real life "Manchurian Candidate" using hypnosis, psychiatry and hallucinogenic drugs. If this article is a bit dry and tough to get through, try this Damn Interesting one on Operation Midnight Climax. <