Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations.
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of persons of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains were still broadly accepted for many years, and the falsity of the hoax was only definitively demonstrated in 1953. An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was responsible for the fraudulent evidence.
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The author of over a dozen books, Shermer is known for engaging in debates on pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism.
Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Fandom on the MediaWiki software. Doddema and Carlson retired from Memory Alpha in 2008 and 2005 respectively. Memory Alpha contains over 51,000 articles and 56,000 images in its English edition alone as of October 2021, making it one of the largest wiki projects. The site is also available in several other languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish.
The Bogdanov affair was an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov. The papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a theory for describing what occurred before and at the Big Bang.
Alex was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds.
David Michael Rorvik is an American journalist and novelist who was the author of the 1978 book In his Image: The Cloning of a Man in which he claimed to have been part of a successful endeavor to create a clone of a human being. The book is widely considered to be a hoax.
America Star Books, formerly PublishAmerica, is a Maryland-based print-on-demand book publisher founded in 1999 by Lawrence Alvin "Larry" Clopper III and Willem Meiners. Some writers and authors' advocates have accused the company of being a vanity press while representing itself as a "traditional publisher". It changed its name in 2014, and since 2017 it has stopped accepting new authors.
John Michael Scalzi II is an American science fiction author and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man's War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, where he has written on a number of topics since 1998. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2008 based predominantly on that blog, which he has also used for several charity drives. His novel Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He has written non-fiction books and columns on diverse topics such as finance, video games, films, astronomy, writing and politics, and served as a creative consultant for the TV series Stargate Universe.
Ryan North is a Canadian writer and computer programmer.
The Taco Liberty Bell was an April Fool's Day joke played by fast food restaurant chain Taco Bell. The ad was created by Jon Parkinson and Harvey Hoffenberg who worked at Bozell, the Taco Bell advertising agency at the time. The ad went on to win several industry awards. On April 1, 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in seven leading U.S. newspapers announcing that the company had purchased the Liberty Bell to "reduce the country's debt" and renamed it the "Taco Liberty Bell". Thousands of people had called Taco Bell headquarters and the National Park Service before it was revealed at noon on April 1 that the story was a hoax. White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry responded that the federal government was also "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial".
Randy Gardner is an American from San Diego, California, who set the record for the longest amount of time a human has gone without sleep. In December 1963/January 1964, 17-year-old Gardner stayed awake for 11 days and 25 minutes, breaking the previous record of 260 hours held by Tom Rounds.
The iLoo was a cancelled Microsoft project to develop a Wi-Fi Internet-enabled portable toilet. The iLoo, which was to debut at British summer festivals, was described as being a portable toilet with wireless broadband Internet, an adjustable plasma screen, a membrane wireless keyboard, a six-channel speaker system, and toilet paper embossed with popular web site addresses. The iLoo was also to have an extra screen and keyboard on the outside, and was to be guarded. It was intended as the next in a series of successful initiatives by MSN UK which sought to introduce the internet in unusual locations, including MSN Street, MSN Park Bench and MSN Deckchair.
IGN is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former editor-in-chief, Peer Schneider. The IGN website was the brainchild of media entrepreneur Chris Anderson and launched on September 29, 1996. It focuses on games, films, television, comics, technology, and other media. Originally a network of desktop websites, IGN is now also distributed on mobile platforms, console programs on the Xbox and PlayStation, FireTV, Roku, and via YouTube, Twitch, Hulu, and Snapchat.
Lou Anders is the author of the Thrones & Bones series of middle grade fantasy novels. Anders is a Hugo Award-winning American editor, a Chesley Award-winning art director, an author and a journalist.
Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a hoax news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mid-1990s. Many print newspapers have been fooled into publishing the story as fact.
Franklin's electrostatic machine is a high-voltage static electricity-generating device used by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-18th century for research into electrical phenomena. Its key components are a glass globe which turned on an axis via a crank, a cloth pad in contact with the spinning globe, a set of metal needles to conduct away the charge developed on the globe by its friction with the pad, and a Leyden jar – a high-voltage capacitor – to accumulate the charge. Franklin's experiments with the machine eventually led to new theories about electricity and inventing the lightning rod.
