Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. This is your host, Stephen Novella,

president of the New England Skeptical Society. And with me, as always, is my panel of

Skeptics, Perry DeAngeles. Hello everyone. Evan Bernstein.

Hi all. And Robert Novella. Good evening everyone.

This week we have a special guest with us, Dr. Michael Schirmer. Dr. Schirmer is the

director of the Skeptic Society, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine. He is also the author of

a column in Scientific American called, can you guess what it's called? Skeptic. He is

the author of many books, The Science of Good and Evil, The Borderlands of Science, Denying

History, How We Believe, and I believe his first skeptical book, Why People Believe Weird

Things. Still a classic in the genre. Hello and welcome Michael.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for joining us this week.

You're welcome. So I thought that we would, since we're dealing with an expert skeptic,

I thought that we would do our science or fiction segment with the guest and Michael

agreed to play along. So we'll start off with that segment, but first a little bit of

follow up from last week. Now if you remember the first science or fiction segment that

we did, what my fake science news item was that NASA scientists had discovered an Earth

size planet and within a few days NASA discovered an Earth size planet. I remember. Which was,

you know, we joked about how prophetic that was. Well last week, we guys remember the

fake story from last week was that scientists had successfully frozen a dog in order to

test medical technology. This week reported on June 27th was that US scientists had

succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death. They brought them down

to near freezing temperature. They didn't quite freeze them, but they did bring their

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