From New Scientist comes this list of thirteen questions that cannot be clearly answered:
13 things that do not make senseOther questions include:
1 The placebo effect
Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
4 Belfast homeopathy resultsFascinating stuff. Cold Fusion is still getting a lot of interest and there are some experiments going on that say that Pons and Fleishman may have something real.
8 The Pioneer anomaly
11 The Wow signal
13 Cold fusion
