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Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage.

School textbooks and state television programs, even if they briefly mention his human rights abuses, celebrate Stalin as a great leader.

Between 1997 and 2007, the rate of autism and organic food sales has risen at the same rate. Obviously, this chart goes to prove that autism and eating organic foods are related to each other and you should avoid organics all together, right? Wrong. This chart is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen detailing how correlation and causation can have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, in many cases, correlation and causation have nothing to do with each other – but what exactly does that mean?

In Latin, the phrase generally used is “cum hoc ergo propter hoc” which translates more literally to “With this therefore because of this.” The opposite, however, is true. Causation proves correlation, but not the other way around.

If a correlation is established, how can you determine causation? Are they caused by the same thing? Does one cause the other? Are they completely unrelated? In order for one event to cause another, they must be related. In other words, there must be some real mechanism connecting the two events (assuming the correlation isn’t completely coincidental). Here, the cause and effect mechanism must comply with the known laws of nature – this (at least) gives us somewhere to start.

In April and May of 2013, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan — working with coauthors Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic — set out to test a question that continuously puzzles scientists: why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates? For instance, why doesn’t the mounting proof that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?

The leading theory, Kahan and his coauthors wrote, is the Science Comprehension Thesis, which says the problem is that the public doesn’t know enough about science to judge the debate. It’s a version of the More Information Hypothesis: a smarter, better educated citizenry wouldn’t have all these problems reading the science and accepting its clear conclusion on climate change. But Kahan and his team had an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps people aren’t held back by a lack of knowledge. After all, they don’t typically doubt the findings of oceanographers or the existence of other galaxies. Perhaps there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer so much as they want to win the argument. Perhaps humans reason for purposes other than finding the truth — purposes like increasing their standing in their community, or ensuring they don’t piss off the leaders of their tribe. If this hypothesis proved true, then a smarter, better-educated citizenry wouldn’t put an end to these disagreements. It would just mean the participants are better equipped to argue for their own side.

Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.

Could social media awareness be a new developmental milestone?  And if so, is my son part of the first wave of children who are nearing adolescence, and all the social awareness that entails, to realize their parents have been posting embarrassing pictures of them online since they were minutes old?Legally, I’m well within my rights as my son’s guardian, but what about ethically? Howard Cohen, a chancellor emeritus and a professor of philosophy at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Ind., said that depended upon whether I agreed with the teachings of Aristotle or those of Immanuel Kant.

What, then, was going on here in the London lab? The woman he was looking at—let’s call her Cassie—was an exception to what twenty-five years of research had taught him. As she took on more and more tasks, she didn’t get worse. She got better. There she was, driving, doing complex math, responding to barking prompts through a cell phone, and she wasn’t breaking a sweat. She was, in other words, what Strayer would ultimately decide to call a supertasker.

They have to be used in conjunction with the physical world, be that reading a sign, noticing a church (with or without a spire of course) or identifying that big hill on your right. This process of using your eyes and engaging your brain leaves memories and knowledge of the world around you. With sat-nav as a guide, nothing is learned nor loved about the journey.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.

Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.

Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.

The team of researchers, led by Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins University, examined over eighteen thousand studies that assessed the effects of various types of meditation.

Aggregating the results of the 47 studies that met the researchers’ methodological requirements, they measured meditation impact on a litany of stress-related criteria: anxiety, depression, stress and distress, positive mood, mental health-related quality of life, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, pain, and weight. Mantra-based programs showed no benefits over and above placebos. + Does that mean that meditation doesn’t work? Not necessarily. Placebo effects are both real and beneficial, and the relaxation that stems from chanting mantras may be therapeutic in and of itself.

Furthermore, mindfulness meditation—a variant that stems from the Buddhist tradition and involves fostering a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment—was found by Goyal’s group to decrease anxiety and depression.