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After the excess of New Year's Eve and the Christmas season, the desire to detox is natural. But the burgeoning industry which caters for this demand makes claims which are frequently misleading or questionable, a group of scientists says today.

The charity Sense About Science has compiled a dossier of information on claims made about 11 products including drinks, patches, diet supplements and even a "detox brush". A charity leaflet says: "The multimillion pound detox industry sells products with little evidence to support their use. These products trade on claims about the body which are often wrong." Our bodies are capable of recovering from binges on their own, the scientists argue.

One product criticised is Boots's "detox brush" which the company claims will "brush away impurities" and "stimulates the lymphatic system to help remove impurities and toxins from your skin". The charity argues that the brush simply cleans the skin.

Boots said the brush works by stimulating the circulation to remove blockages in the body's lymphatic system. "All Boots products go through extensive scientific trials and testing with human volunteers. Our evidence is based on customer feedback and the results they saw and how they felt," said a spokeswoman.

But she admitted that the effect was not specific to the detox brush. "Using any kind of body brush will help to increase circulation and will help the body eliminate the waste products." Another product - the Crystal Spring Detox patch - is meant to be stuck to the foot where the manufacturer claims it draws toxins out of the body.

"The footpads contain tourmaline crystal, which is a natural source of far infrared [radiation]," said a Crystal Spring spokesman. "They create warmth in the foot and the herbs in the pads have a drawing action - they absorb perspiration which contains toxins."

But Dr Adrian Finch, a mineralogist at St Andrews University says this claim is misleading. "Tourmaline is not particularly radioactive. Therefore the amount of heat it emits is the same as the heat it absorbs (ie from your feet)," he said.

Crystal Spring's spokesman said: "We work closely with trading standards to make sure that our products and marketing materials do not make any unsubstantiated claims and conform to the latest EU standards."

Also criticised was the Farmacia spa therapy detox pad which, according to the company's website, "harness powerful natural ingredients, including tree sap and use the principles of foot reflexology to rid your body of these damaging toxins".

Tom Sheldon, of Sense About Science, asked Farmacia at the company's Harrods concession whether cutting down on alcohol and cigarettes would be as effective. "There's no substitute for that at all, there really isn't," the company's representative said. When asked to back up the company's claims with scientific evidence the representative said: "There have been very many scientifically controlled studies and unfortunately the findings are inconclusive."

To "cleanse your system and whisk away the polluting nasties" is the claim from V Water Detox, a brand of soft-drink owned by PepsiCo. When Frances Downey, of Sense About Science, contacted V Water to ask how it worked she was told that it is "formulated using herbal extracts that have been proven to aid liver function such as artichoke and dandelion," and that the drink was "designed by a celebrity nutritionist". When the Guardian asked the company for evidence of how the product works and the identity of the celebrity, V Water declined to answer any specific questions. A spokesman responded: "We are in the process of reviewing the ingredients and labelling information of V Water Detox."

The chemical scientist and award winning science author Dr John Emsley said: "There is no scientific reason for people to waste time and money on so-called detox regimes, fancy diets, or expensive remedies, none of which can compare to the detox system that is already inbuilt into our natural system."

Sir Colin Berry, professor emeritus of pathology at Queen Mary, University of London, agreed: "It's easy to detox; just let your body use the great systems it has evolved over thousands of years to get rid of whatever is harming you. But if it's booze, drink less as well."

"Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves." So says the intro to edge.org's annual New Year challenge to the world's greatest thinkers.

This year it is asking "What will change everything – What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" And as ever, the great and the good have responded to the call. Geneticist Craig Venter, psychologist Steven Pinker, novelist Ian McEwan, philosopher Dan Dennett, physicist Paul Davies and cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut are just some of the overwhelmingly male-dominated list of more than 110 respondents.

For Pinker, the exercise is doomed to fail:

I have little faith in anyone's ability to predict what will change everything. A look at the futurology of the past turns up many chastening examples of confident predictions of technological revolutions that never happened, such as domed cities, nuclear-powered cars, and meat grown in dishes.

By the year 2001, according to the eponymous movie, we were supposed to have suspended animation, missions to Jupiter, and humanlike mainframe computers (though not laptop computers or word processing – the characters used typewriters.) And remember interactive television, the internet refrigerator, and the paperless office?

Despite believing that it is impossible to predict how technology will change the world, Pinker gamely has a stab, forecasting that personal genomics will alter medicine, our understanding of "temperament and cognition" as well as insurance.

Climate change, peak oil and the looming energy crisis prey on many of the contributors' minds. For McEwan, the sun holds the key:

How fortunate we are to have a safe nuclear facility a mere 93 million miles away, and fortunate too that the dispensation of physical laws is such that when a photon strikes a semiconductor, an electron is released. I hope I live to see the full flourishing of solar technology – photovoltaics or concentrated solar power to superheat steam, or a combination of the two in concentrated photovoltaics.

Could it be possible that in two or three decades we will look back and wonder why we ever thought we had a problem when we are bathed in such beneficent radiant energy?

New Scientist editor Roger Highfield plumps for another energy technology to get us out of the climate mess:

Fusion power could be a source of energy that would have a greater impact on humankind than landing the first man on the moon ... Greens will complain that the money would be better spent on renewables but if this unfashionable gamble pays off the entire planet will be the winner.

Various respondents put manipulating our bodies and brains at the heart of a big future change. The psychologist Irene Pepperberg raises the intriguing notion of being able to "understand and repair brains susceptible to addictions, or criminality", and evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel has his sights on re-engineering the human body:

Scientists will for once make the science-fiction writers look dull. The limbs (and organs, nerves, body parts, etc) that we re-grow will be real, making those bionic things like Anakin Skywalker gets fitted with after a light-sabre accident seem primitive. This will make transplants obsolete or just temporary, and things like heart disease will be treatable by growing new hearts.

Some in the list clearly did not read the Edge folks' instructions not to blow their own trumpets. "No self-promotion: referencing your own writing or books ... No selling from the stage, pushing your well-known agenda."

Venter, for example, does not shy away from promoting his own work on synthetic biology:

We can start with digitised genetic information and four bottles of chemicals and write new software of life to direct organisms to do processes that are desperately needed, like create renewable biofuels and recycle carbon dioxide. As we learn from 3.5 billion years of evolution we will convert billions of years into decades and change not only conceptually how we view life but life itself.

But then again, when you are on the verge of creating new life forms, I guess it is hard to be modest.

What interested you in the list? What technology or idea do you think will transform our world?

Anti-oxidant supplements do not reduce your risk of developing cancer, according to a trial involving more than 7,500 women. The researchers gave vitamins C, E, beta-carotene or placebo pills to patients and followed their progress for an average of nearly 10 years. The results showed that the supplements, either on their own or in combination, did not protect the women against cancer.

Beloved of health food shops and alternative therapists, anti-oxidant pills have been marketed as preventive therapies to ward off everything from cancer to the signs of ageing. Until recently, the theory behind much of this seemed sound. Numerous studies have shown that people who eat a healthy balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables are less likely to develop cancer and one benefit of these foods is thought to be the anti-oxidant chemicals they contain. Why not get that benefit directly in a pill?

Several large studies have now compared the benefits of supplement pills against placebos and have conclusively shown that the benefits of a healthy diet are not shared by vitamin pills — and in some cases they have been shown to be harmful.

In the new research, Dr Jennifer Lin and her colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, gave vitamins C, E, beta-carotene or placebos to 7,627 women who were at high risk of cardiovascular disease. After an average of 9.4 years' follow-up, 624 of the women had developed cancer, of which 176 died. But these cancer cases were distributed evenly between the different treatment groups, and there was no statistical difference between the number of deaths among people taking single anti-oxidants or combinations and the group taking the placebos.

"Supplementation with vitamin C, vitamin E, or beta-carotene offers no overall benefits in the primary prevention of total cancer incidence or cancer mortality," the authors wrote in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "In our trial, neither duration of treatment nor combination of the three antioxidant supplements had effects on overall fatal or nonfatal cancer events."

The results agree with those of a separate randomised controlled clinical trial of vitamin C and E supplements, published in November. That study, which involved nearly 15,000 men in the US, found no cancer prevention effect from taking the supplements.

The advice from Cancer Research UK is that supplements cannot take the place of eating a healthy diet. "The best way to get your full range of vitamins and minerals is to eat a healthy, balanced diet, with a variety of fruit and vegetables. Supplements do not substitute for a healthy diet, although some people may be advised to take them at certain times in their lives."