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The Lactic Acid Is Gone a Day Before You Get Sore
Blood lactate is back to baseline about half an hour after you stop. Soreness peaks two days later. Whatever is hurting, it left the building long before.
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Tech
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.
Health
FICO Has a Page Called "Myth Busting." Almost Nobody Has Read...
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.
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Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
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.
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.
The Documented Danger at Marathons Is Drinking Too Much
In a study of 488 Boston finishers, the strongest predictor of dangerous blood sodium was gaining weight during the race. What runners drank made no difference at all.
Sport news
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.
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.
Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
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.
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.
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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.
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The Lactic Acid Is Gone a Day Before You Get Sore
Blood lactate is back to baseline about half an hour after you stop. Soreness peaks two days later. Whatever is hurting, it left the building long before.
The Documented Danger at Marathons Is Drinking Too Much
In a study of 488 Boston finishers, the strongest predictor of dangerous blood sodium was gaining weight during the race. What runners drank made no difference at all.
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.