There are many conflicting accounts as to whether the Athenian statesman Alcibiades was a lover of Socrates. The Wikipedia page on Alcibiades' depiction in culture states: "Alcibiades also appears in several Socratic dialogues" In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades "claims to be in love with Socrates." "Plato presents Alcibiades as a youthful student and lover of Socrates" The Wikipedia page on Socrates himself gives two conflicting pieces of evidence: "Some texts suggest that Socrates had love af...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
In this video with US Ambassador Tom Barrack, he states If you just look at the demographics, you're going to have by 2040/2045 10 billion people in the world; 5 billion Muslims. Is this projection correct?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I've seen some articles (CogniArchae.com, Facebook, X.com) featuring what appears to be a serpent-like entity allegedly depicted on a wall in the Altamira caves, as below: Yet I haven't found any official sounding catalogue numbers assigned to it, nor does it appear here: https://www.ancientartarchive.org/altamira-cave-spain/ That may not be the definitive end-all-be-all, but it is enough to concern me that it's not real. Is it authentic, and, if so, what is its proper catalogue number?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
President Trump is quoted in the UK newspaper The Independent as saying: I mean, for a little baby to be injected with that much fluid, even beyond the actual ingredients, they have sometimes 80 different vaccines in them. It’s crazy. I know the MMR injection combines three different vaccines, but I have never heard of an injection that combines eighty different vaccines. Is there such a vaccine? Or maybe it's a misunderstanding e.g. a single vaccine is effective against eighty different st...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
A social media post I encountered stated that Lehi was supposedly the sender of letter bombs to the then-president Harry Truman and other high-ranking officers at the White House during Jewish insurgency in Palestine. Is this true?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
It is often remarked that Lord Byron (often regarded as one of "the greatest British poets") had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh (eg here). However, other sources appear to regard this as a myth (eg here). Until recently, I presumed that this was something which we had insufficient of to confirm or deny. However, while reading the Wikipedia page on Lord Byron, I saw the following line: The biographer of Byron André Maurois who had access to the poet's archive, r...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
According to Raw Story, Andrew Kolvet tweeted I want to address some of the discussion about the lack of an exit wound with Charlie.[...] [...] I mentioned to his doctor that there were dozens of staff, students, and special guests standing directly behind Charlie on the other side of the tent, and he replied: “It was an absolute miracle that someone else didn’t get killed.” “His bone was so healthy and the density was so so impressive that he’s like the man of steel. It should have...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
The California Driver Handbook advises: When you park on a hill, your vehicle could roll due to equipment failure. Remember to set the parking brake and leave the vehicle in park, or in gear for manual transmission. To park: On a sloping driveway: Turn the wheels so the vehicle will not roll into the street, leave the vehicle in park and set the parking brake. Headed downhill: Turn your front wheels into the curb or right toward the side of the road. Headed uphill: Turn your front wheels away...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
While scrolling through twitter, I came across this image being shared around by certain right wing accounts, as well as forums and websites relating to eugenics. It makes the claim that populations of people from Africa are more genetically distinct from other ethnic groups than domestic dogs are from wolves and coyotes. The implication the people sharing this graphic seem to have made is that the data suggests that African people are a different species from other human ethnic groups. The r...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Many sources claim Pablo Escobar lost 10% of his money yearly to rats, at one time totalling $2.1 billion a year. At His Peak Pablo Escobar Was Losing $2.1 Billion A Year Due To Rats Eating Money In Storage (Barstool Sports, 2015) Known as the “king of cocaine”, Escobar’s wealth was so immense that he stashed piles of cash in Colombian farming fields, dilapidated warehouses, and in the walls of cartel members’ homes, according to Roberto Escobar, the cartel’s chief accountant and th...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I just came across an article on Peter Putnam, allegedly a 20th century physicist who invented something like reinforcement learning (though the details are unclear) and was forgotten until a recent effort to dig into his cryptic writings. The whole thing doesn't seem plausible at all, since Putnam was supposed to have, among other things, donated $40M made by investments to Nature Conservancy or corresponded with Einstein and Wheeler, and yet he has left no trace other than this one article ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
A clip on Instagram going run has Trump saying "smart people don't like me." It has 50,000 likes. It was also picked up by Hindustan Times., which was unable to verify it. Did Trump state that "smart people don't like me"?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I'd like to fact-check this claim: While it’s hard to quantify who or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there's essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI. Joe Wilkins, Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code, Futurism, 10 September 2025. (Emphasis mine.) It was motivated by a prediction by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: I think we will be there in three to six months,...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
One of the survivors of the Nova music festival massacre has claimed the following: When I say “terrorist”, I am including not only Hamas but also the thousands of Gazan citizens who infiltrated the country of Israel just to loot, rape, and kill. [Video] Is this claim true? I would like to know because, as outlined on Wikipedia, this claim was repeated by Israeli officials to dehumanize Gazan civilians based on their being supposedly complicit in the attacks.| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
There are apparently a bunch of law groups recruiting for potential class action lawsuits happening right now targeting medicines that contain acetaminophen (known as paracetamol outside the USA), most notable Tylenol. The lawsuits allege that the use of acetaminophen products during pregnancy caused children to develop autism spectrum disorder. All of the lawsuits seem to be motivated by the Consensus statement 'Paracetamol use during pregnancy - a call for precautionary action.' I've scanne...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
One common trope in fiction over the decades has been someone putting a file in a cake—or other baked good—that then is passed onto someone in prison to help them escape. As the website TV Tropes explains: The stereotypical way to smuggle escape tools into a prison is by hiding them in a cake and giving them to the prisoner. Most often a nail file is hidden in the cake. Granted, most of the time I have seen this trope played out it was with a larger “rasp” file. But that minor quibble...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I was listening to BBC news radio last night - 18th day of May 2017 and I heard this guest who was campaigning for people to stop dumping trash in the oceans. Probably not the same very words but the meaning is the same: "... some oceans are so remote such that if you are standing there the closest person to you is in the space station" I thought to myself, hmm another flat earth troll who needs an atlas but I realized I couldn't even estimate the distance from the oceanic pole of inaccessibi...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Is this actually a portrait of Buddha, drawn by one of his disciples? Here is a link saying: One of Buddha's disciple draw it secretly, while Buddha was teaching. Yes, Sakyamuni Buddha is Mongoloid race. The original photo stored in British museum. Gautama Buddha's real portrait at the age of 41| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I often encounter the claim that in its early years, Hamas received some support from Israel (Mossad, Shin Bet, or some other part of the Israeli state), supposedly to prop up a competitor to Fatah and split the Palestinian movement further. I also heard the theory that Israel (or rather one of its secret services) wanted the most extreme Palestinians in one organization to better surveil them. The last time I encountered the claim was in Gilbert Achcar's well received The Arabs and the Holoc...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the wonders of ancient civilisation having collected many thousands of scrolls containing knowledge and literature from across the known world. The 2009 movie Agora is partially about its destruction and tells this story (my emphasis): When the Christians start defiling the statues of the pagan gods, the pagans, including Orestes and Hypatia's father, ambush the Christians to squash their rising influence. However, in the ensuing battle, the pagans u...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
This article (along with this article and many others) mentions some plots by CIA to overthrow the Cuban leader Fidel Castro: Staging the Second Coming so that the Cubans, still religious deep inside, would abandon their anti-clerical leader Poison him with thallium salts so that he would lose his beard, and with it, the political power, based in major part on his charismatic looks Giving him LSD before a live radio broadcast so that the incoherency of his speech would make people lose trust ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Several sources claim that eating soy has an effect on estrogen levels (for example, Livestrong, American Cancer Society and sfgate). Some sources go further and say eating soy affects men's sex-drives: Soy foods lower your sex drive (Japanese housewives would feed more soy to their husbands to reduce their virility when they feared infidelity or pregnancy) Soy’s has also been proven to lead to infertility in males. Source: HealthLevelUp Does soy affect sex drive (via estrogen levels or oth...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Popular facebook group Nature isn’t always kind and cuddly. A study showed that sea otters will restrain baby seals and then begin copulation; sometimes drowning it during the 105-minute-long process. Even after the seal is dead, the otter will hang on to the carcass and continue to mate with it for up to a week. I read this post on "I fucking love science"-group on facebook. Is it really true sea otter rape baby seals to the death?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
This question has probably been asked by almost everyone at some point in their lives. But the answers we receive vary from "it is very good" to "it is very bad". I can understand that becoming obsessive about it is bad (in fact becoming obsessive about anything is bad). But this seems a psychological effect, not one that brings actual physical harm. Is there any definite evidence to say that it is good or bad ? By bad, I mean do we see any definite physical effects like impotency, nerve weak...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
I often hear claims that some activities, nutrients, ... "boost" your immune system. My understanding of the immune system is that it is a finely tuned machine with enormous destructive power. If| Skeptics Stack Exchange
The quote "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" is attributed to Mark Twain, but I've never seen it attributed to one of his published works. Did he ever use it in an article, letter, or book? Or was it a just a quip he supposedly said at parties?| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
The honey swirl test1, 2, 3 claims real honey remembers the shape of the honey comb. You can bring this out by swirling water over the honey. After 30 seconds you'll see a honey comb pattern. Is this claim valid? I see two parts to this claim: the test is reliable honey remembers the honey comb I view those parts as independent. Proving or disproving part 1 doesn't convince me of 2. I don't have a clue about 1. Please enlighten me. But 2 I'll make a case against if only so you can show where ...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Wikipedia's article on Zaleucus as well as the one on Locri cite a rule about proposing a new law: Anyone who proposed a new law, or the alteration of one already existing, had to appear before the Citizen's Council with a rope round his neck. If the Council voted against the proposal the proposer was immediately strangled. As far as I can tell the origin of this story comes from a speech by Demosthenes that is at best hearsay if not pure rhetoric. Is there any more conclusive evidence that t...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
According to the SEP page on David Hume (see my emphasis in bold): "Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” (Prolegomena, Introduction) and Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume “caused the scales to fall” from his eyes (“A Fragment on Government”, chapter 1, paragraph 36, footnote 2). Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution." More specifically, the following is also stated (lower down) on the same page:...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
There are several sources that make a claim like that, I'm giving some of them: We don’t do sex work because we are poor, we do sex work to end our poverty Key sentence in that link: We are also the backbone of the tourism industry, which makes up around 10% of Thailand’s annual GDP. Sex toys popular in Thailand despite conservative laws Key sentence in that link: The sex industry is thought to comprise up to 10% of Thailand’s gross domestic product. Sun, sea, sand... and a £5bn sex tr...| Recent Questions - Skeptics Stack Exchange
Is there evidence for a correlation between the use of mobile phones and the occurence of brain cancer? If yes, is there also evidence for causality?| Skeptics Stack Exchange
Dr. Gerald Schroeder published an article in Aish.com about the age of the Universe and the Jewish bible: So the only data I use as far as Biblical commentary goes is ancient commentary. That m...| Skeptics Stack Exchange
To my knowledge, the Vatican does not provide a public account of all the details of its finances. (The Institute for the Works of Religion does provide summaries of some financial information in| Skeptics Stack Exchange
Nick Turse (in a 2025 paper published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University): The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than th...| Skeptics Stack Exchange
A Forbes article and the University of Melbourne, among other sources, claim “Only Two-Thirds Of American Millennials Believe The Earth Is Round”, which seems to imply that one third of American| Skeptics Stack Exchange
There have been a number of news articles and social media posts (see: here, here, and here) claiming that Pope Francis' personal net wealth, at the time of his death, was estimated at just $100 (w...| Skeptics Stack Exchange