Pseudoscientific ideas – and the hacks and hucksters who often benefit from them – are certainly nothing new. But in the age of AI slop and unregulated social media platforms, ideas dressed up in the language of science but lacking its methods and rigour have perhaps never been so ubiquitous. Defining what makes an enquiry scientific, and therefore demarcating it from pseudoscience, has actually proved quite difficult, even for scientists and philosophers of science. However, in this TED-Ed animation, Siska De Baerdemaeker, a researcher and philosopher of cosmology at Stockholm University, argues that there is a fairly simple, three-pronged approach that pretty much anyone can adopt to test if a claim is truly scientific, or merely trying to sound the part.

29 July 2026

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