The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up to the rigor of actual facts or science, and yet they all ...

Even intelligent people fall victim to faulty thinking, especially when it comes to science. Some try to use it to validate their spiritual beliefs. In this piece for Backstory, Larry Potash delves ...

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Strange stories are often used to fill gaps in human knowledge. But why do people love bizarre explanations for the unexplained? Dr. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen look to answer this in their new book, ...

A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness-research community. It argues that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something ...

Pseudoscience is a system of explanations, methods, and assumptions that pose as science but don’t follow core scientific principles like testability and falsifiability. Pseudoscience is different ...

Dean of the College Michael D. Gordin’s book “On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience” has been named the Princeton Pre-read for the Class of 2029. The book, which uses history and philosophy ...

Physician Kang and journalist Pedersen follow up their 2017 collaboration, Quackery, with a fizzy survey of outlandish theories from throughout history. The authors explain that polygraphs test for ...