At Oakland North, a project of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, reporter Alyssa Fetini asks the pressing question: “Psychics are ubiquitous in Oakland, but are they for real?.”

Fetini interviews several store-front “psychics,” as well as the proprietor of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, which purports to train anyone to exercise psychic powers. After allowing the psychics to offer their own claims, she gives UC Berkeley psychologist Kyle Jennings a chance to respond. “Psychologists,” Jennings explains, “would not believe that a person was actually psychic.”

Fetini then reviews some of the recent reports of psychics defrauding customers (as previously reported at BAS).

Director of the Berkeley Psychic Institute Richard Pozzuto gets the la…

Happy 200th (posthumous) Birthday to Charles Darwin.

He doesn’t look a day over 190…

This year marks the 200th year since Darwin was born, on February 12, 1809.

Celebrating this date, known as Darwin Day, is celebrating science, skepticism and humanity; and most of all, our better understanding of the way the world works.

This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the evolutionary biologist’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species.

To celebrate these two anniversaries, there are festivities throughout the world, and of course, across the Bay Area.

The festivities have already begun, with a lecture by our own Dr Genie Scott at the University of California Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley. The event was extremely popular!

On Sunday 8, 2009 the tir…

We live in times of increased distrust of science, which has real consequences in terms of people’s quality of life and health, not to mention, potentially, in terms of the very future of the human ecosystem. So this is surely not a good time to criticize science itself, right? Well, the problem with critical thinking is that it is supposed to be applied universally, including to science itself. Instead, some well-known science popularizers, and even skeptics, act like uncritical cheerleaders, thus undermining that very confidence in science they so cherish and rightly encourage. Let’s talk about it, shall we?

WHO: Massimo Pigliucci is an author, blogger, podcaster, as well as the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His academic work i…