“It turned out the sub-bottom is like an inky sand art. Or a Chinese brush painting of mountains.”

Melissa Clarke, a graphic artist in Brooklyn, describes making art based on scientific measurements of the Hudson River (Columbia University State of the Planet blog).

“In an era when a 5 per cent treatment effect over placebo is considered a perfectly acceptable basis to market multi-billion dollar drugs, why should poor old Mrs Putt have to demonstrate such a high threshold of effectiveness?”

Julie Robotham, of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, playfully sides with a ‘psychic’ who failed to demonstrate her powers in a recent test.

“The medical profession has to wake up if we’re going to save billions of lives. … Being a climatologist and jumping up and down pulling my hair out and saying ’we’re all going to die in a horrible way’ does not work.”

Climatologist Mark Maslin explains why medical journal the Lancet has got together with medics to call climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century” (BBC).