Archive

Antarctica Is Gaining Ice. It Is Also Losing More Ice Than at Any Point in the Satellite Record. Both Are True, and Neither Means What You Have Been Told.

The ice sheet has been growing for five years — because the ocean around it lost its ice cover, while the glaciers underneath run faster than ever into the sea.

Myers-Briggs Was Built by a Mystery Novelist and Her Mother. Neither Had Studied Psychology. 88% of the Fortune 500 Have Used It.

Take it twice and your type probably changes. That isn't your fault — it's what happens when you cut a bell curve down the middle four times and call the pieces types.

Five More Things You (should) Know That Aren’t True.

Lemmings, the Great Wall, ostriches, Einstein, and knuckle-cracking — five things nearly everyone is sure of that fall apart the moment you look.

People Start 85% of Wildfires. That Doesn’t Debunk Climate Change — and the Arson Story Is Mostly Made Up.

Who strikes the match and what turns a match into a firestorm are two different questions. Arson is real, a minority of cases, and falling — while heat and drought quietly do the rest.

The Biggest Mask Study Ever Run Found One Thing That Worked in Covid — and It Wasn't the Mask You Were Wearing.

The randomised trials arrived after the mandates ended — and the biggest one ever run found the mask that worked wasn't the cloth one nearly everyone wore. What the evidence actually shows.

The Banana in Your Fruit Bowl Is a Genetic Clone. Its Predecessor Was Wiped Out in 1965. Its Replacement Is Dying Now.

How a Victorian duke's greenhouse curio became the world's most-eaten fruit — and why the fungus killing it now killed its predecessor in 1965.

Five Things You Know That Aren't True.

Bulls can't see red, Vikings never wore horns, and a copywriter with a deadline invented the diamond ring — five things almost everyone gets wrong, corrected in about two minutes.

One Nobel Prize. Four Billion People Fed. And the First Poison Gas Attack in History.

SpaceX, Artemis, China’s Moon Race — It All Started With a Rocket Built by Slaves