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When people in the West think of terrorist attacks, they may think of Charlie Hebdo, or the 7/7 London tube and bus bombs, the Madrid train bombs and of course 9/11 - and although some Muslims did die in these attacks, most of the victims wouldn't have been Muslim. The overall number of deadly terrorist attacks in France, the UK, Spain and the US, however, is very low by international standards. Between 2004-2013, the UK suffered 400 terrorist attacks, mostly in Northern Ireland, and almost all of them were non-lethal. The US suffered 131 attacks, fewer than 20 of which were lethal. France suffered 47 attacks. But in Iraq, there were 12,000 attacks and 8,000 of them were lethal.

The tracking of terrorists on social media should take a cue from nature, Dr. Johnson said, where “the way transitions happen is like a flock of birds, a school of fish.”

That cynicism was echoed this week across Pakistan, where conspiracy-minded citizens loudly branded Ms. Yousafzai a C.I.A. agent, part of a nebulous Western plot to humiliate their country and pressure their government. Muhammad Asim, a student standing outside the gates of Punjab University in the eastern city of Lahore, dismissed the Taliban attack on Ms. Yousafzai as a made-for-TV drama. “How can a girl survive after being shot in the head?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

A philosopher called Hermogenes argues that the relationship between a word and its meaning is purely arbitrary; Cratylus, another philosopher, disagrees; and Socrates eventually concludes that there is sometimes a connection between meaning and sound. Linguistics has mostly taken Hermogenes’ side, but, in the past eighty years, a field of research called phonetic symbolism has shown that Cratylus was on to something.

The U.S. military appears to be moving in the direction of eliminating pilots, albeit tentatively. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have long operated unmanned drones, including the Predator, which are used for reconnaissance and bombing missions. In 2013, the U.S Air Force successfully tested the QF-16 fighter-bomber, which is practically identical to the F-16, except that it doesn’t have a pilot onboard. The plane is flown remotely. Earlier this year, Boeing, the manufacturer of the QF-16, delivered the first of what will be more than a hundred QF-16s to the Air Force. Initially, the planes will be used as flying targets for F-16 pilots to engage during training missions. But at least some military observers expect the QF-16 to end up being used in attack missions.

Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.

“People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.

It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.

IS says ancient shrines and statues are "false idols" that have to be smashed. "They are erasing our history," said Iraqi archaeologist Lamia al-Gailani.

How quickly an element decayed and how it did so — meaning which of its component parts it shed — became the focus of researchers in radioactivity. Apart from purely scientific insights, there was a hope that radiation could lead to something marvelous. X-rays, a kind of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Roentgen and produced by accelerated electrons, had already been hailed as a major medical breakthrough and, in addition to showing doctors their patients’ insides, were being investigated as a treatment for skin lesions from tuberculosis and lupus. In her 1904 book “Investigations on Radioactive Substances,” Marie Curie wrote that radium had promise, too — diseased skin exposed to it later regrew in a healthy state. Radium’s curious ability to destroy tissue was being turned against cancer, with doctors sewing capsules of radium into the surgical wounds of cancer patients (including Henrietta Lacks, whose cells are used today in research). This enthusiasm for radioactivity was not confined to the doctor’s office. The element was in face creams, tonics, even candy. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article that Curie and her daughter wrote on radium in 1926, preliminary experiments suggested that radium could even improve the quality of soil.

The petition asks the news media to abandon the most frequently used term for people who question climate science, “skeptic,” and call them “climate deniers” instead. By Degrees A column by Justin Gillis about our changing climate. 3.6 Degrees of Uncertainty DEC 15 A Tricky Transition From Fossil Fuel NOV 10 Shining Star Power on a Crucial Subject SEP 22 In the Ocean, Clues to Change AUG 11 Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils JUL 7 See More » Climate scientists are among the most vocal critics of using the term “climate skeptic” to describe people who flatly reject their findings. They point out that skepticism is the very foundation of the scientific method. The modern consensus about the risks of climate change, they say, is based on evidence that has piled up over the course of decades and has been subjected to critical scrutiny every step of the way.

Mr. Cook said the order would amount to creating a “back door” to bypass Apple’s strong encryption standards — “something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create.”

New research suggests that the microbes in our guts—and, consequently, in our stool—may play a role in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to allergies and obesity, and reports of recoveries by patients who, with or without the help of doctors, have received these bacteria-rich infusions have spurred demand for the procedure. A year and a half ago, a few dozen physicians in the United States offered FMT. Today, hundreds do, and OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states. The Cleveland Clinic named fecal transplantation one of the top ten medical innovations for 2014, and biotech companies are competing to put stool-based therapies through clinical trials and onto the market. In medicine, at any rate, human excrement has become a precious commodity.

What Shaw and Porter found astonished them. “We thought we’d have something like a thirty-per-cent success rate, and we ended up having over seventy,” Shaw told me. “We only had a handful of people who didn’t believe us.” After three debriefing sessions, seventy-six per cent of the students claimed to remember the false emotional event; nearly the same amount—seventy per cent—remembered the fictional crime. Shaw and Porter hadn’t put undue stress on the students; in fact, they had treated them in a friendly way. All it took was a suggestion from an authoritative source, and the subjects’ imaginations did the rest. As Münsterberg observed of the farmer’s son, the students seemed almost eager to self-incriminate.