More or Less

How much water should you be drinking? There’s some age-old advice that suggests you should be drinking eight ounces (230 ml) eight times a day. Some people even advise you should be drinking this on top of what you normally drink. There is lots of advice out there but how do you know when you’ve had enough or if you’re drinking too much. With help from Professor Stanley Goldfarb from the Universi...

There have been reports that those radical Swedes have decided to reduce the working day to just six hours because, it has been claimed, productivity does not suffer. Before you all rush to the Swedish job pages this is not quite the case – but there have been trials in Sweden to test whether you can shorten people’s working hours without having an effect on output. Tim Harford talks to our Swedis...

Saving lives with thin air - by taking nitrogen from the air to make fertiliser

Improving data to target help to the poorest people

Tim Harford poses a tough statistical challenge

Are footballers trying to get suspended for Christmas?

Notable deaths, Rule Britannia and creating your own Christmas speech

We look at the numbers behind the scary headlines about birth control.

The economic doom that never was; childhood cancer figures and Ed Balls

The survey by the Indian PM that broke all the polling rules and started a mass protest

What are the odds of being related to a medieval king? and how many cows for a fiver?

Renewable capacity has surpassed that of coal–is this good news? Plus an asteroid update.

High-rolling pensioners? predicting Norovirus, air pollution deaths and lost or found?

A new NASA warning system means we’re getting better at spotting Earth-bound space rocks. But how safe are we?

Is dementia on the rise? Plus immigration, incomplete contacts and chocolate muffins

Sexual violence was widespread in Liberia’s brutal and bloody year civil war. But were three quarters of women in the country raped? We tell the story behind the number and reveal how well-meaning efforts to expose what happened have fuelled myths and miss-leading statistics that continue to be propagated to this day, including by the UN. We speak to Amelia Hoover Green from Drexel University, Dar...

Who voted in the US elections? Plus are there nine million stray cats in the UK?

Does the world really spend three times as much on ice cream than on humanitarian aid?

The fact-checkers have been working overtime looking into the numbers used by Donald Trump during his campaign to become President of the USA. In the wake of the election next week, we take a look at some of Trump’s more outrageous statistical claims

Is a girl under 15 married every seven seconds? And beware dangerous algorithms

How many people die for every kilo of cocaine? More Or Less investigates.

When maths can get you locked up.

It’s now a year since the UN set its new Sustainable Development Goals to try to make the world a better place. They include 17 goals and a massive 169 targets on subjects like disease, education and governance. But some people like Bjorn Lomborg are saying that there’s just too many and they are too broad, and left like that will never achieve anything. Is he right – and is there a better way to...

Polling on the first TV debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appears to be divided over who won it. But not all polls are equal. If the people being polled aren’t representative of the population at large, then their responses may not tell you anything useful. And when internet polls can be hijacked by online activists, they can throw up some pretty strange results. (Photo: Donald Trump...

This week Donald Trump claimed that there are some inner city areas in the US which are suffering from the worst crime rates ever. They are so dangerous, he says, that Afghanistan is safer than many of these areas. But could this be true? We take a look at crime in the US and assess whether you can compare it to a conflict zone such as Afghanistan. (Image: Chicago - Neighbourhood residents watch a...