How a well-meaning TikTok disrupted 4,600 studies. Read more
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A TikTok tale
How a well-meaning TikTok disrupted 4,600 studies.
Simpson’s Paradox: How to make vaccinated death figures misleading
A tricky statistical phenomenon at play.
Does wearing a mask halve your chances of getting Covid-19?
Is it true wearing a mask reduces Covid-19 incidence by 53%?
Does catching Covid give you more immunity than being vaccinated?
Infection vs injection: Could Covid infection provide 27 times more protection?
The psychological economics of gift giving
How to buy gifts people actually want.
Numbers of 2021
The most significant numbers of the year
Will the population of Nigeria be larger than Europe’s?
Will Nigeria’s population really reach 600million?
How much plastic is in the ocean and can Mr Beast make a difference?
Can two social media stars remove $30million worth of plastic from the ocean?
QAnon: Did 365,348 children go missing in the US in 2020?
Fact checking a QAnon claim.
Are female patients more likely to die if the surgeon is male?
Should women be worried about having a male surgeon?
Fertility rates: Baby boom or bust?
Fertility rates around the world
Placebo: Can you fool your brain?
Looking at the power of expectations
Testosterone and sport
Trans women’s participation in elite sport
Hospitalisation rates for children with Covid
What does the data tell us?
Did lockdowns save any lives?
Did lockdowns actually save any lives?
Numbers in Ukraine and low seas in Chagos
Troop and casualty numbers in Ukraine
Does the UK take in more refugees than other European countries?
Fact checking Boris Johnson’s claim
Pizza and nuclear war
How good negotiation can help us split pizzas fairly and also avoid nuclear war.
Why has Hong Kong’s Covid wave been so bad?
What’s behind one of the worst Covid death rates ever?
Will the war in Ukraine cause a global wheat shortage?
How much of the worlds wheat comes from Ukraine and Russia
Did tea-drinking cut deaths in the Industrial Revolution?
How tea became an accidental lifesaver in 18th Century England.
Subitising and simplifying: how to better explain numbers
How can we clearly explain complex numbers to the public without losing their meaning?
Understanding India through data
What can data tell us about a country of 1.4 billion people?
Sweden’s polarising pandemic response
Has Sweden’s pandemic response been a triumph or a disaster…or something in-between?
Have the oceans become 30% more acidic?
Tim Harford asks how we measure the health of our oceans
Did the WHO get some of its excess death estimates wrong?
We look at the World Health Organisation’s latest estimates of the pandemic’s death toll
Are just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions?
Looking at numbers on green house gas emissions and stress.
Noisy decisions
Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman on how 'noise' impacts decision making
Are girls starting puberty earlier?
We look into a claim that the age of girls’ puberty is falling rapidly
Hannah Fry: Understanding the numbers of cancer
The maths professor on the choices she and others have faced after a cancer diagnosis
How often do people have sex?
Looking at sex and statistics in Japan and America.