Some medicines are excellent, some are worse than useless. How do we sort the wheat from the chaff?
 
Steve Haigh is a Medicines Information Pharmacist whose day job is to help to keep the chaff out of Nottinghamshire NHS hospitals.
 
The talk goes through the history of medicines, the design of clinical trials to work out what works best, and the fascinating problem of the placebo effect.
 
And what discussion of Bad Medicine and the placebo effect wouldn’t touch on the King of Nonsense, homeopathy?

Astronomy has been the subject of wonder and speculation for as long as historical records exist. As with all science, people got some things right and, even with the best methods available, other things wrong.

Since 2007, Alice Sheppard has run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, the discussion area for an online astronomy project with 300,000 members worldwide. Galaxy Zoo has so far produced 21 papers, whose authors and acknowledged contributors include several ordinary citizens. Some of its findings were a direct result of questions or collections of objects created by the users, who became "Citizen scientists".

Alice takes us through some of the best and worst of astronomical history, and what ancient and modern mistakes are made today. We will hear the questions people have come to Galaxy Zoo with, the ways in which biases were found and dealt with by the scientists and participants, the beautiful and inspiring projects created by untrained people and the scientific thinking they learnt for themselves to apply.

We also take a look at citizen science in general, how Galaxy Zoo taught large numbers of people to understand and use science, and explore what this might mean for skepticism.

Alice is one of the founders of both Cardiff and Hackney Skeptics In The Pub. She has just moved to London to start an MSc in Astronomy. By night she writes about science and astronomy at aliceingalaxyland.blogspot.com

In the meantime, why not classify a few galaxies for yourself at www.galaxyzoo.org

History is used often as an argument for authority or policy but how accurate are many of the examples mentioned in the news?  Diving back into skepticism's past, Liz will tell us about the tools used by skeptics and secular activists from the 19th and 20th centuries, the campaigns they fought and also how we can continue that legacy today.  

Her love of European history and castles brought her over to the UK in 2006 and the beer, skepticism and doing an MA has made her stay. If you've ever heard Liz talking about History, you'll be familiar with her enthusiasm and extensive knowledge, which she'll be treating us to with a lesson in skeptical history.

Liz has a BA (hons) in History from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario and a MA in history from Birkbeck College, University of London in London.

In the meantime, listen to 'The Pod Delusion': a weekly news magazine podcast about interesting things! Highly recommended. The Pod Delusion is a submission-based podcast. If you have something interesting to say, we're sure they'd love to hear from you.

From predictions of sin, fire and brimstone in ancient stories, to asteroids, viruses and climate change in films today, the human race has long speculated - and dramatized - about how it will all end. Yet no matter how creative our stories are, science, Alok Jha will tell us, offers us even weirder possibilities.

Some of them are cosmic in origin, such as a monstrously large magnetic storm from the Sun; or from the Earth itself, such as a catastrophic volcano or a reversal of our magnetic field. Others are due to the human race's own advancements: drugs, terrorism, cyborgs - or even some of these combined, such as a solar storm affecting our communications and electrical technology. Or, if we're really unlucky, we might wander too near a black hole or a (so far) hypothetical particle called the strangelet, which is able to turn all particles it encounters into a copy of itself - and could do this to everything on the Earth over a matter of hours.

Is this anything to worry about? Alok Jha has spoken to various people who think it might be. 99% of species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct - and the Sun itself will become a red giant one day. "Humanity as a whole does not invest much in improving its thinking on how to enhance its own survival," he reports. Come and hear how, if we can't put off The End, it might at least be a lot more interesting than we thought.

 

Martin Robbins, of the Guardian's Lay Science blog, reports on dangerous pseudo-medical practices outside the Western world, from homeopaths in East Africa to flat earthers and anti-vaccine campaigns in Nigeria.

As part of this talk, Martin will be showing video clips of his recent visits to homeopathic projects in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, shot for a film he is making with Michael Story, with support from the Wellcome Trust.

Martin Robbins is a writer, podcaster and journalist covering science, pseudoscience and evidence-based politics. Besides the Guardian, he has written for the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent and New Scientist. He also hosts the Strange Quarks podcast with Michael Marshall.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/layscience