During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Voltaire called superstition a “mad daughter” and likened it to astrology. The leading thinkers of the time espoused reason and…

Cognitive scientist Jim Davies can show you how the mind works. In fact, he believes that the mind is a book that can be opened and read, if you know the language in which it’s written.…

What do you say when faced with something so unlikely, so improbable, that you simply cannot imagine it ever happening? Perhaps you’ll admit your neighbor was right about who owns…

Everybody has that one story they tell. That one incredibly unlikely thing that, had it not happened to them, they might not even believe. They found the only other person on a deserted…

Salty Salt Sue met Fat Johnny Little at a card game so hot it burned a girl, the sultry Louisiana night dampening her clothes, making her tingle from the waist down. She sat next to…

It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties.…

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was in many ways an enemy of the unlikely. The quintessential empiricist of his age, Hume’s 1748 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,…

To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences…

The history of science is punctuated with medical breakthroughs that seemed unlikely in the times from which they arose. Infections from simple cuts or sore throats laid waste to millions…

Finding regularity in nature is the bread and butter of science. We know that reptiles lay eggs, while mammals bear live young; the Earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days;…