‘I felt like I was part of a power surge (sort of like what I imagine it would be like to be locked in a tractor beam like is described on Star Trek). I was being pulled along on this giant wave of energy while also being part of the cause of the wave – it was very powerful.’

The scene would not look out of place in Breaking Bad. Special Forces in camouflage gear and night vision masks stealthily break into a house and hold up its terrified owner, still in his dressing gown, shining a light in his face as they catch him holding a bottle of what appears to be illegal contraband.

Question: what do you think the UK government would do when faced with a naturally occurring human protein that well could be a successful breakthrough treatment for cancer and save them billions of pounds on largely useless treatments like chemotherapy?

Answer: If you said ‘ban it, as unfit for humans’ you are correct, for that’s exactly what the British government has done with GcMAF, the ‘supermolecule’ being used to treat cancer and many other life-threatening diseases.

Susan Sontag memorably coined the term ‘Illness is metaphor,’ which always had a ring of truth to me. We get the diseases that are a metaphoric representation of some struggle in our lives. But it’s also true that there is such a thing as ‘treatment is metaphor,’ and nowhere more so than with the treatment of cancer.

Michael Shermer is the quintessential material guy – founder of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, poster boy for the entire skeptic movement, a true debunker of all things you can’t measure or explain with science. Shermer is downright condescending about believers in all things supernatural or paranormal, which is why what happened to him on his wedding day threatened to destabilize the entire edifice of his rock-solid rationalism.

It’s music to the ears of any couch potato and anyone else fired with New Year resolution to get in shape. It’s also one of my favorite studies about the power of thought. 

A group of scientists at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio wanted to find out basically if there was any difference between going to the gym and just thinking about going to the gym.

The Charlie Hebdo killings have focused the mind on free speech – freedom of expression, to call it by its formal legal name – and also revealed how little we know about what it actually means, as witnessed by the comments on last week’s blog.