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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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Tech
The 50% Divorce Rate Was True for About One Year. You...
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.
Health
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.
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Renting is not throwing money away, but the real argument is stranger
Housing’s celebrated 7% return is almost all rental yield. Real capital gains run about 1% a year — and the variable that decides the answer is whether you actually invest the difference.
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.
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.
Sport news
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.
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.
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.
Two Researchers Disagreed About Money and Happiness. So They Ran the Study Together.
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.
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.
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Renting is not throwing money away, but the real argument is...
Housing’s celebrated 7% return is almost all rental yield. Real capital gains run about 1% a year — and the variable that decides the answer is whether you actually invest the difference.
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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.
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.