Trending Now
World news
Learning Styles: The Experiment That Would Settle It Has Almost Never...
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.
Travel guides
Tech
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.
Health
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.
Most popular
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.
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 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.
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.
Sport news
The people who found the Blue Zones are quietly walking them back
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.
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.
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.
Nobody Is Left-Brained. The Man Who Won the Nobel for Split Brains Said So...
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.
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.
Recipes
"Miss the 10 Best Days" Is Half of a Calculation
The statistic every advisor quotes is real. So is the mirror image nobody quotes — and when a researcher ran both at once, the result was not the one the slogan implies.
LATEST ARTICLES
Latest article
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.
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.