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Two specialists look at the same breast image. One is an experienced doctor, the other is an artificial intelligence program. Sometimes their opinions match, sometimes they diverge. How often they agree determines how accurately they can together distinguish healthy tissue from a tumor.

Two particles behave like a pair of unusual dice: thrown at opposite ends of the universe, they always land on the same face. Physicist John Stewart Bell calculated: if the dice had hidden rules, the frequency of matches would have a strict limit.

A lab robot counts molecules, and gets it wrong. One tube shows 0, another 12, a third 3, though in reality they all hold roughly the same amount. Such 'raw' numbers are common in biology: DNA sequencing, counting species in a water sample, gene activity. There's plenty of data, but it's sparse and more scattered than simple randomness would predict.