Beating a polygraph test is piece of cake. Aldrich Ames was worried about man an upcoming polygraph and his Russian handlers told him to get a good nights sleep and be friendly to the people administering the test. You can practice relaxing with biofeedback equipment which is essentially the same as a polygraph. You can take drugs like beta-blockers and tranquilizers that will make you dead to stress which is the mechanism of the polygraph. There are people on whom a polygraph doesn't work. My God, google "how to beat a polygraph".
Because if they're not, they're really weird. Average people are really weird. The average person is really stupid. Half of the of the population are dumber than they are. Find me a normal person and I'll show you someone really strange.
A million children a day die from diseases related to a lack of safe water. Can we engineers design cheap, maintainable safe water systems? Tell me Vasimir is worth the life of one child.
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.