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The four-day week trials mostly didn’t test a four-day week
The pilots cut about four hours a week, not eight. Iceland never ran one. And the best-instrumented trial found healthier workers, unchanged revenue, and a significantly faster pace of work.
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The people who found the Blue Zones are quietly walking them...
Nicoya’s advantage inverted in forty years. Okinawa fell from 4th to 26th. And the researchers conceding this are the ones who identified the zones in the first place.
Health
Nobody Is Left-Brained. The Man Who Won the Nobel for Split...
A study of 1,011 brains looked for people whose left or right hemisphere ran stronger overall. It found lateralised functions everywhere and lateralised people nowhere.
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Opposites don’t attract, but that was never the interesting question
115 of 118 partner traits correlate positively. The gap is in personality — and the twist is that none of it predicts whether a couple will be happy.
The 21-day habit rule came from a plastic surgeon’s book preface
Maxwell Maltz was describing how long patients took to get used to a new face. When researchers finally measured habit formation, the range ran from 18 days to 254.
Nobody Selling You a Detox Can Tell You What They Are Removing
A group of scientists rang fifteen detox companies and asked one question: which toxin does this remove? Not one could answer. The regulators have been making the same point in court for twenty years.
In 1998 Millions of Americans Became Overweight Overnight. Nobody Gained Weight.
BMI was named in 1972, in a study of 7,424 men, as a tool for comparing populations. Twenty-six years later a committee moved one number and changed who counted as healthy.
Sport news
The 90% divorce prediction that was never a prediction
The famous accuracy figures are real, and they measure something other than prediction. What happens when a divorce model is finally tested on data it has not already seen.
Where the three-to-six-month emergency fund rule actually came from
The most repeated number in personal finance was set in 1996 by polling 156 advisers. Six million households of bank data suggest a very different answer.
Blue-Light Glasses: What the Cochrane Review Found
Seventeen randomised trials, and no reliable evidence that blue-filtering lenses reduce eye strain. The physics is the more interesting part: the lenses block roughly eight percent more blue light than the clear ones.
The Vitamin D Trials Nobody Talks About
Two of the largest supplement trials ever run found almost nothing. Then the Endocrine Society withdrew the threshold that made half the country deficient in the first place.
Opposites don’t attract, but that was never the interesting question
115 of 118 partner traits correlate positively. The gap is in personality — and the twist is that none of it predicts whether a couple will be happy.
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The Meditation Researchers Auditing Their Own Field
Fifteen leading contemplative scientists published a paper warning about the hype around their own discipline. Almost nobody reported it — including the finding that when you finally ask people properly, most report side effects.
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No Sleep Guideline Anywhere Says Eight Hours
The official number is "seven or more" — a floor with no ceiling. When researchers measured sleep in three societies without electric light, every group averaged under seven.
Your Metabolism Does Not Slow Down at 30. It Holds Steady Until 63.
A study of 6,421 people across 29 countries mapped human energy expenditure from eight days old to 95. It found four life phases. None of them begins at 30.
In 1998 Millions of Americans Became Overweight Overnight. Nobody Gained Weight.
BMI was named in 1972, in a study of 7,424 men, as a tool for comparing populations. Twenty-six years later a committee moved one number and changed who counted as healthy.