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What ‘just go for a walk’ leaves out
The evidence on exercise and depression is weaker than the headlines and more interesting than the sceptics allow. It points at structure and supervision, not walks.
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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.
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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.
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The latte factor gets the arithmetic right and the mechanism wrong
His sum checks out to the dollar. But 85% of people are passive savers who ignore price incentives, and financial education explains 0.1% of the variance in behaviour.
No health authority has ever recommended 10,000 steps
Every official physical activity guideline is written in minutes, not steps. A 1965 pedometer brand name filled the gap — and it is aimed at exactly the wrong people.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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 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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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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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.
The 50% Divorce Rate Was True for About One Year. You Can Name It.
In 1981 the United States recorded 2,422,000 marriages and 1,213,000 divorces. Divide one by the other and you get 50.1%. It was also the peak year. The statistic has not been updated since.
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.