Lottery chance 1 in 14 million

Question: What mistake do United Kingdom national lottery players routinely make, some 10,000 of them, each week? Or maybe it's not a mistake. They could still win, couldn't they?

Answer: All things are possible, picking 6 numbers out of 49. But consider: If they (and their descendants) purchased a ticket every week and kept at it until the year 136,467 AD, they'd have about a 50 percent chance of winning on this 1-in-14-million proposition. (Never mind how much they'd have spent on tickets by then.)

Now on this lightning-strike day of winning far in the future, there's another downside. The jackpot would have to be divided equally with the rest of the 10,000 winners, because that's the typical number of players selecting the 1 2 3 4 5 6 combo, says "New Scientist" magazine. Is this a sort of tongue-in-cheek selection, since most people feel that any set with an obvious pattern is an unlikely winner (actually, all patterns are equally likely to win). Or just maybe they don't care. Playing is fun, the investment is small, the money goes to social purposes, and in the off-off-off chance they do win, several million bucks divided by 10,000 still leaves plenty for a nice night out on the town.

Question: Confidential conversations behind closed doors are one thing. But what about behind closed windows?

Answer: Maybe you've heard about LIDAR for "Light Detection and Ranging," just like radar except that it uses pulses of light instead of radio waves, says Geoff Andersen in "The Telescope: Its History, Technology and Future."

Sound, of course, is transmitted by vibrations in the air, which can cause vibrations in surrounding objects. For example, if people are talking inside a room, the windows will vibrate ever so slightly. If a laser is aimed at the windows, the reflective signal can be gathered by a telescope and analyzed to reveal sounds and conversations going on "behind closed windows."

So effective is this technique that in places where classified discussions take place, the rooms must be well isolated from the outside world. "Where this is not possible, as with the Oval Office of the White House, there are usually double panes of glass to dampen the signal and active shaker systems applied to the outer pane to further confuse any potential eavesdroppers."

Question: In looking for that mysterious "sixth" sense in humans, where might be a good place to swing into action?