The White House released their own "Disclosure Day" tranche of UFO files - and the result was the dampest of damp squibs.

I recently had a conversation with someone using this phrase to allow for the possibility of… idk, *things* to exist outside of our understanding of reality (this was a convo about spirituality).

My initial thought as a skeptic was to reply that we should approach everything with a “we know what we know” mentality, but I am a too new of an acquaintance to go at them like that.

How do you handle conversations like this?

Genetically Modified Skeptic, as the name suggests, publicly presents himself as a skeptic. However, in my view, his content has ceased to be meaningfully “skeptical”. Instead, it’s activism targeted at religion, capitalism, conservatism, etc. As far as I can tell, he never attempts to critique the more left-wing views he holds.
For example, in this video we find him citing Lenin and accusing people of being “imperialist collaborators”. He also seems to advocate cutting off those who hold certain views rather than attempting to engage with them.

What do you think?

It is genuinely frightening that this conspiracy theory is widespread enough in the US to have its own Wikipedia page for its American presence. 33% of Americans believe in it, and two thirds of Republicans do.

American skeptics won’t run out of work anytime soon, that is for sure.

I'm genuinely tired by conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience, and hoaxes like moon landing denial, anti-vaccination, genocide denialism, 9/11 conspiracy, alternative medicine, wellness, race realism, great replacement, and other theories from my family members and social media pages. This subreddit feels like a breath in the fresh air because many users value evidence and facts over conspiracy theories and vibes. Thanks for the existence of this subreddit

A rumor that a scientific study determined that wearing sunscreen "massively increases" the wearer's risk of common skin cancers circulated online in late June 2026.

One social media post about the alleged results of the study said, "The single LARGEST sunscreen-skin cancer study EVER conducted found sunscreen users face dramatically higher risks of EVERY major skin cancer."

Some versions of the claim circulated with a link to a story about the purported findings that cited only other social media posts on the topic.

The claim was false.

The study cited in the claim was published in the November 2023 issue of the medical journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

The study aimed to explore "gene-specific environment interactions in at-risk individuals" as it pertained to the link between sun exposure and skin cancers.

The claim that the study found sunscreen increases cancer risk appeared to originate from the social media account of Nicolas Hulscher, a self-described epidemiologist who works for the McCullough Foundation, a conservative nonprofit organization that describes its mission as performing "independent investigations of public health conditions and policies."

Legends tell of a ferocious man-eating "ground shark" that terrorises divers in the Timor Sea - but behind the myths is a very real creature.

New Article posted on the Journal Ecology Letters.

Journal Information: Ecology Letters is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Wiley and the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Peter H. Thrall is the current editor-in-chief, taking over from Tim Coulson (University of Oxford). The journal covers research on all aspects of ecology.

Impact Factor: 7.9 (2024)

The Paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70426

The authors put forward and defend a common definition of sex in a wide variety of biologial organisms:

"Biological sex is a binary classification of reproductive strategies for propagating genetic material, defined by differences in gamete size (i.e., anisogamy). The production of large, nutritive gametes produced at a relatively low rate (i.e., macrogametes, such as eggs and ovules) is referred to as the ‘female’ strategy, whereas the production of small gametes produced at a relatively high rate (i.e., microgametes, such as sperm and pollen) is referred to as the ‘male’ strategy."

Common criticisms/difficulties of this definitions are addressed:

"Another point worth clarifying concerns the biological sex of non-reproductive individuals. Male and female strategies can be mapped onto these individuals according to the developmental trajectories they possess (Griffiths and Spencer 2025). Therefore, an individual producing one of the two gamete types during its lifetime can be associated with the corresponding strategy and classified as a male or a female, whereas an individual producing both types during its lifetime can be classified as a sequential (i.e., male or female at different times) or simultaneous hermaphrodite (i.e., simultaneously having male and female sex functions). This approach allows assigning male and female strategies to, for example, sexually inactive juveniles, post-reproductive adults, or organisms exhibiting seasonal variation in gamete production. However, it is not always meaningful to assign a sex to every individual, as in the case of early embryos of species with environmental sex determination, sequential hermaphrodites in the process of switching sex (Griffiths 2020), or diploid individuals in the life cycle of mosses and liverworts (Bachtrog et al. 2014; Coelho et al. 2018)."

And, further, that defining sex as a binary does NOT imply they are mutually exclusive:

"However, defining biological sex as binary does not imply that individuals necessarily fall into two classes, as they can produce male, female, both, or neither gamete class."

As an analogy, in the binary numerical system, all numbers are composed of 1s and 0s, the existence of a number than contains both, does not break the binary. A binary system does not imply in mutual exclusion.

Alternatively, in the same Journal, an article was published with the title: "There is No Consensus on Biological Sex"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70350

Here, the authors elucidate 3 different sexual definitions in biology: Gametic sex, Multivariate Sex, Sex Eliminativism. And then go on to show pros and cons of those.

For example: They say that a weakness of the gametic definition is that it's often unmeasurable due to experimental difficulties

"While the gametic definition is simple in theory, it is difficult to use in practice, as many scientists do not (and cannot) directly observe gamete size in their system due to invasive techniques that often confer mortality. Scientists may understand biological sex using the gametic definition, but operationally use proxies of gametes to classify the sex of individuals."

While for the multivariate approach:

"Although many are proponents of a multivariate approach, in practice, scientists are still operationally defining biological sex using a univariate definition (e.g., using only one column in Figure 1). Additionally, different univariate traits may be chosen to define sex across studies within the same system, which may lead to a lack of reproducibility."

EDIT: For those still questioning the credentials of the paper, here is the note from an editor on both papers, showing that both were peer reviewed and available to foster more intellectual discussion:Here is the editor's note on both papers above:

"Alternative Viewpoints on Biological Sex"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.70439

Gregory F. Grether

"We had planned to publish two Viewpoints on biological sex in the same issue of the journal. In retrospect, this was not a good idea because it failed to account for how long manuscripts can take to move through peer review. When I was assigned Eppley et al.'s manuscript, I felt it merited review but knew its publication in Ecology Letters would be controversial. When the reviews arrived, one by Tim Janicke made a particularly compelling case for the prevailing (though increasingly contested) view that biological sex is binary. We therefore invited Dr. Janicke to write a Viewpoint on the subject, invited Dr. Eppley and other experts to review it, and intended to hold both manuscripts until they had completed peer review."

EDIT: BINARY DOES NOT IMPLY MUTUAL EXCLUSION, NOR THAT A BINARY SYSTEM IMPLIES ONLY TWO CLASSIFICATIONS.

DEFINITION OF BINARY:

The term binary refers to something composed of two parts, elements, or alternatives. [1, 2]

NOT DEFINITION OF BINARY: Something that is MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE A OR B.

click this link to see what I’m talking about

Byrne, 63, resigned as Overstock.com’s CEO in 2019 after a reported relationship with convicted Russian spy Maria Butina. He later became involved in efforts to challenge the legitimacy of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Byrne, who is no stranger to conspiracy theories, has repeatedly claimed that the younger Biden tried to get an $800 million bribe from Iran in exchange for his father’s administration releasing $8 billion in Iranian funds that are frozen in South Korea and for the U.S. to “go easy” in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

“These defamatory statements by Byrne are not merely false and not merely malicious — they are completely outrageous,” Biden said in his complaint. “Byrne knows his statements are baseless and yet published and republished them anyway, and he continues to propagate his lies to anyone who will listen, including his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.”

The video examins many of logical fallacies used by MAGA, including Sraw Man, Whataboutism, Ad Hominem, Slippery Slope.