More or Less

Are our attention spans now shorter than a goldfish's?

Top Hollywood actresses have complained that they are paid less than their male co-stars

What happened last night in Sweden?

Hidden Figures, the film, has been nominated for three awards at the Oscars and has been a box office hit in the US. It tells the little-known story of a group of African American women and their contribution to the space race in the 50s and 60s. We explore the history of how these women were recruited by Nasa and put to work on complex mathematical tasks – at a time when African Americans and wom...

A huge hole was left in the world this week with the death of the Swedish statistician Han Rosling. He was a master communicator whose captivating presentations on global development were watched by millions. He had the ear of those with power and influence. His friend Bill Gates said Hans ‘brought data to life and helped the world see the human progress it often overlooked’. In a world that often...

Does North Carolina really rank alongside North Korea if you measure electoral integrity

How many went to celebrate – and how many to protest – the Trump inauguration?

Blue Monday and Oxfam’s comparison wealth of billionaires and the poor –the stories that come around every year.

Were 90,000 Christians killed because of their faith in 2016?

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...