File photo: silhouettes of a group of people at sunset. Photo: Sue Huan (Unsplash), via Wikimedia Commons, CC0. In the news · July 2026 A Victorian parliamentary inquiry made 39 recommendations after reviewing 317 submissions and hearing from survivors of groups such as the Two by Twos and Geelong Revival Centre. It proposes outlawing group-based…
File photo: a dispatch room at the Redding Interagency Command Center, California. Photo: Region 5 Photography, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. In the news · July 2026 The FCC published a Next Generation 911 reliability and interoperability rule in the Federal Register, effective 10 August 2026. It requires covered providers to make location facilities reliable,…
How much vitamin A a tablespoon of liver, cod liver oil or sweet potato actually carries — what deficiency does, and why the 3,000 microgram upper limit matters.
Macronutrients, micronutrients and the thirteen vitamins — plus what EAR, RDA, AI and UL actually mean, and why an intake below the RDA is not a deficiency.
File photo: a teenager texting on a smartphone. Photo: Summer Skyes 11, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. In the news · June 2026 A Eurobarometer survey of 26,297 teenagers and 12,750 parents across the EU, carried out in March and April 2026, found that 25% of teens exceed six hours of daily screen time…
Key takeaways · 13 min read The half-million figure rests on one survey: the 1999 Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey, about 38,000 households. It reported under-five deaths rising from 59 to 116 per 1,000 between 1990 and 1991, reaching 142 by 1998. Three later national surveys — 2004, 2006 and 2011, covering 75,000 households…
Key takeaways · 12 min read The backfire effect comes from a 2010 paper whose own second experiment failed to reproduce it at the group level. The largest test since — five experiments, more than 10,000 people, 52 corrected claims — found it zero times. Across the literature, 81% of reported backfires used a single-question…
Stagnation and Legionella are genuinely linked — in dead legs and capped pipe spurs. An empty building is a different claim, and in the one building anyone measured, the standard remedy backfired.
The famous figure came from 392 people, applied only to strained spouses, with a confidence interval starting at 1.00. Larger studies found the reverse — and inside them, strain still predicts death.
A systematic review of 26 studies found 1,984 people struck by kinetic impact projectiles: 53 died and 300 were permanently disabled. Neither that review nor its companion on tear gas can give you a rate, and both say so.
