“Simply knowing the risks around you is often enough to avoid them, or to make them smaller.” We don’t tell you what to believe. We show you what the evidence actually found. That sentence is the reason this site exists. Most everyday harm is not random, and most of it is not fixed by buying something. It is fixed by knowing which few things actually matter.
ROR Labs looks at ordinary risk — the kind you meet in a kitchen, a car, a bathroom, a phone call — and asks a narrow question about each one: what does the evidence actually say, and what would change the odds?
That turns out to be a surprisingly uncommon question. Most writing about risk is either alarming or reassuring, and both are easier to produce than being accurate. We try for accurate, which sometimes means telling you a thing is more dangerous than you thought, and just as often means telling you it is not.
How we decide what to believe
Every article works down the same hierarchy, and we tell you which rung a number came from.
- Peer-reviewed research firstSystematic reviews and large cohort studies before individual papers. Cochrane reviews, published meta-analyses, and trials where they exist.
- Then government and public-body documentsThe CDC, EPA, WHO, USPSTF, NHTSA, NFPA and their equivalents. Regulatory decisions and official statistics, cited with their dates.
- News last, and only for recent eventsUseful for what happened last month. Never used as the evidence base for a health or safety claim.
We flag modelled numbers as modelled. A great deal of published risk data consists of estimates built on top of other estimates. Where a figure is an attributable-fraction model rather than a measurement, we say so — and we treat the direction as more trustworthy than the decimal places.
Why we sometimes tell you not to buy things
This site earns money through affiliate links and advertising, which creates an obvious incentive to recommend more rather than less. We handle that in the most direct way available: by writing down, in the article, the products we deliberately did not link, and why.
Across the articles published so far, that list includes HEPA purifiers sold against nitrogen dioxide (they filter particles, not gases), suction-cup grab bars (they cannot meet the load standard), melatonin for chronic insomnia (sleep medicine recommends against it), vitamin D for fall prevention (the recommendation was withdrawn in 2024), standing desks sold as heart-health devices, mould sprays, home lead test strips, deepfake-detector apps, and brain supplements.
Each of those would have earned us a commission. Telling you they do not work is the only version of this site worth running — and if a recommendation here is ever worth acting on, it is because of the ones we left out.
What we are not
We are not doctors, and nothing here is medical, legal or financial advice. We summarise published evidence so you can have a better-informed conversation with someone qualified — and several articles end by telling you that the most valuable next step is an appointment rather than a purchase, because that is what the evidence said.
Who writes this. ROR Labs is written by Seung Hyoun Kim, an engineer with a doctorate and a CPCU (Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter), working in the property and casualty insurance industry. Assessing how likely something is to go wrong, how badly, and what reduces it, is the working day — this site applies the same discipline to the risks people meet at home rather than the ones that arrive as claims.
That background shapes the approach in one specific way. Insurance takes seriously the difference between a frequent risk and a severe one, and between a hazard you can engineer out and one you can only manage. Those distinctions run through every article here.
Questions, corrections and disagreements are welcome at rorlabs.io@gmail.com. If we get something wrong, we would rather know.