Recently a new movement made its way to Lithuania - anti-vaccine movement. Some parents after reading few texts online become convinced that vaccines are actually dangerous to health of their children. Thus they decide no to vaccinate their children. A brief reading online somehow trumps centuries of scientific progress in Medicine.

While we here at Physics of Risk usually write about economical and social systems, but the tools we use may be as effectively used to understand the spreading of diseases. Contemporary scientific literature usually uses network theory to find optimal vaccination strategies, but we will not delve in this complex matter. Our aim in this text is to show that vaccination helps saving lives of millions of people. Thus we may use a simpler agent-based model for this.

Sean Gourley TED talk on general mathematical laws of war and the possibility to model armed conflicts.

We all know that noise can prevent you from falling asleep, but it seems that noise could actually make you fall asleep. See DNews video for the explanation - why?

Simon Anholt worked a long time as an independent policy advisor. He has helped politicians and policy makers to improve economic, political and cultural relationships with other countries Now he works on interesting project - so-called Good Country Index. This index attempts to quantify how good the countries are in a sense that how useful they are to the world. See Simon's Anholt's talk recorded for TED.

You might also be interested to study Good Country Index on your own.

In the begging of 2016 largest US lottery Powerball decreased the odds of winning the jackpot to around 1 in 300 million. What is interesting in this development is that it was done to attract more players and thus increase the profitability of the lottery. Intuition would suggest that any rational individual should quit playing the lottery, but what will real people do?

The main catch in these lotteries is that the jackpot is carried over to the next game until it is won by somebody. Thus smaller odds of winning the jackpot imply that the jackpot will have more time to "grow". Namely there will be more consecutive games with jackpot left intact, thus the jackpots will become larger. The data shows that the larger the jackpot the more people will buy lottery tickets. Thus in the long run this strategy should attract more people to play the lottery. Consequently, in the long run, the profitability of the lottery should increase.

Watch Extra Credits video or read Wired for more information.