Category: science

701. Margarine was invented in response to Napoleon III’s call for a cheap alternative to butter (Vaisey-Genser 2003) 702. People consistently underestimate others’ desire for feedback (Abi-Esber et al. 2022) 703. Dentists with shorter waiting times are more likely to propose unnecessary treatment (Gottschalk et al. 2020) 704. Teaspoons and tablespoons are unreliable dosing devices […]

676. Many psychology researchers overestimate the evidence in favor of a theory if one or more results from a set of replication studies are statistically significant (van den Akker 2023) 677. The movie Sideways led to an increase in the growing of pinot noir grapes in lower value Central Valley vineyards (Consoli et al. 2022) […]

651. Words for negative concepts mutate more than words for positive concepts across Indo-European languages (Jackson et al. 2022) 652. Renters are starkly underrepresented at all levels of government in the United States (Einstein et al. 2022) 653. The term jaywalking was defined in a larger struggle to redraw the boundary between street use and […]

In the book Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson describes his fascination with the London Underground map: “What a piece of perfection it is, created in 1931 by a forgotten hero named Harry Beck, an out-of-work draughtsman who realized that when you are underground it doesn’t matter where you are. Beck saw – and […]

A new paper finds that “scandal-ridden politicians tend to get fewer votes at the ballot box, are more likely to lose elections, and are less likely to win re-election”. The title of the paper is “The Electoral Consequences of Scandals: A Meta-Analysis”, and while I find the conclusion sensible (I would not expect scandal-ridden politicians […]