Cross-posting from my Weblog, just because

[redbird]

Never mind bad[ly written] sex, the Guardian presents the 2004 Bad Science Awards: where the Ig Nobel prizes commemorate achievements that should not be repeated, the Bad Science list is achievements that never were, from fraudulent credentials to studies too small to be remotely meaningful:

The British tradition of not giving journal references for science-based stories made all of these categories difficult to judge. In May, our first candidate, the Sunday Times, described reishi mushrooms (Ganoderma lucidum) as having "performed well in trials to reduce the pain of postherpetic neuralgia". The only paper we could find relating to this subject on Pubmed referred to a trial of four people in 1998. It had no control group.

Alas, in a moment of good taste the names of the winner and runners-up for "most unlikely death sustained while credulously being treated by a transparently fraudulent alternative therapist" have been withheld.