It鈥檚 hard to underestimate our brain鈥檚 ability to find meaning in the banal, the contradictory, even the unintelligible. There is a scene on the television show Silicon Valley in which a tech mogul...
There is a popular saying in the skeptical community: the plural of anecdote is not data. The clever putdown is meant to remind the person you are speaking to that no matter how many people swear...
True crime series like Serial and Making a Murderer invite us to sharpen our abilities and to outperform the detectives assigned to the case in figuring out what really happened. We hear the...
In 1940 Japanese researcher Michio Takaoka submitted his thesis for a graduate degree in which he described studies of plants with a folkloric history of having medicinal properties. Such studies...
Faked photographs have been with us since the beginning of photography itself, but the wide availability of software and social media has made the creation and distribution of these visual...
Predictions made by psychics and astrologers tend to quickly fade from memory because of how wrong they often turn out to be, but one prediction made by Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist and famous...
鈥淩einforce and Boost Your Immune System鈥� promised the ad splashed across two pages of a local newspaper. There were products galore! Mushroom extracts, probiotics, collagen supplements, exotic oils...
When the imaginative little boy was asked in school to give an example of how heat makes things expand and cold causes them to contract, he authoritatively stated that in the summertime the days...
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb...
RSS