It’s estimated that human adults make about 35,000 decisions a day — the percentage of good decisions depends on the adult. These choices can be as banal as deciding to roll or crumple toilet paper or ...

Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is ...

Bayes' theorem, also called Bayes' rule or Bayesian theorem, is a mathematical formula used to determine the conditional probability of events. The theorem uses the power of statistics and probability ...

Nate Silver, baseball statistician turned political analyst, gained a lot of attention during the 2012 United States elections when he successfully predicted the outcome of the presidential vote in ...

SCIENCE, being a human activity, is not immune to fashion. For example, one of the first mathematicians to study the subject of probability theory was an English clergyman called Thomas Bayes, who was ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American On our most recent episode of our podcast My ...