I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that nobody could figure out how he pulled them off.
In the November 1925 issue of Popular Science, Houdini wrote an essay describing his obsession with the other kind of mystifiers: those who claim to have supernatural powers. Every day of his 35-year career, Houdini wrote, he had been thinking about psychics who supposedly communicate with the dead. He visited dozens of them and, as described at length in the essay, uncovered all of their lazy tricks. To give just one fun example, Houdini showed how mediums, during pitch-black seances, used trumpets controlled by their feet and mouths to produce voices that their audience believed to be ghosts.
Houdini did not consider himself a skeptic, but rather a public servant.
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Last Sunday, the day before the world’s population hit 
My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel.
Years ago, when her young son was going through a mummy phase, 
In perhaps the same way that Americans prattle on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the French never tire of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Many years after completing the Beagle voyage, crafting the theory of natural selection and writing the most famous scientific tome of all time, Charles Darwin took up psychology.
Mars exploration has followed a long and bumpy interplanetary road. There have been 38 separate missions to Mars, and more than half have failed. The latest mission — the Phoenix lander — marks the 39th journey. Here, highlights of these Earthly attempts to film, circle and touch the cold Red Planet.
