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Stretching Barely Prevents Injuries. Strength Training Cuts Them by Two Thirds.
A meta-analysis of 26,000 participants ranked the injury-prevention strategies head to head. The one everybody does came last. The one almost nobody does came first, by a mile.
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Tech
Two Researchers Disagreed About Money and Happiness. So They Ran the...
The famous $75,000 plateau and the study that contradicted it were both partly right. Finding that out required something research almost never does: the two authors sat down and re-analysed the data jointly.
Health
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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Sugar Does Not Make Children Hyperactive. The Study That Proved It Tested the Parents.
A 1995 meta-analysis of 23 controlled trials found no effect. A year earlier, a smaller study had already explained why everyone believes otherwise — by giving every child a placebo and lying to their mothers.
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.
Learning Styles: The Experiment That Would Settle It Has Almost Never Been Run
You are not a visual learner or an auditory learner. The claim has a precise testable form, a required study design, and a research literature that overwhelmingly endorses it without using that design.
The eight-glasses rule is a sentence someone deleted
The 1945 document blamed for the rule said most of your water comes from food and that thirst is an adequate guide. Both sentences were cut. Here is what the evidence actually shows.
Sport news
The Open Office Was Built on a Measurement. Then Nobody Measured It Again for...
When researchers finally put sensors on employees before and after a redesign, face-to-face interaction fell by about 70%. The study did not measure productivity — and after six decades of fit-outs, almost nothing has.
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.
The eight-glasses rule is a sentence someone deleted
The 1945 document blamed for the rule said most of your water comes from food and that thirst is an adequate guide. Both sentences were cut. Here is what the evidence actually shows.
Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day
The randomised trials point gently the other way. But the real story is the audit that found only 17% of citations to a key trial described its results accurately.
The sleep chart everyone copies has a footnote nobody reads
The age-by-age sleep chart is a compromise document, and the panels that wrote it said so. What the primary sources actually show about how much sleep you need.
Recipes
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.
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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.
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.
FICO Has a Page Called "Myth Busting." Almost Nobody Has Read It.
The company that makes the score has published, in writing, that carrying a balance does not help it. Its own survey found 67% of Americans wrong or unsure about what the score can even see.