Julio M. Ottino (NAE) is dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University, and Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P.

The modern world bustles with magical thinking. Some of us pick up pennies for good luck, believe we missed a flight for a reason or become convinced that a computer tried to ruin our day by crashing.

One of South Africa’s many complex challenges involves fixing and improving its education system. As part of this, the government has come up with a national strategy for three crucial teaching and ...

Growing up near the World Bank’s agricultural development project in Anyigba (present day Kogi State, Nigeria), Mark Akubo and his friends would visit the aerodrome to watch light planes take off and ...

I admit that “magical thinking” is not a great term for what I was writing about in The 2012 Election and the Super-Conscious Mind. In that post, I wrote that many people saw the contribution of ...

Public opinion towards science has made headlines over the past several years for a variety of reasons — mostly negative. High profile cases of academic dishonesty and disputes over funding have left ...