More Or Less: Behind The Stats

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 University of Pennsylvania, Wesley Stephenson finds out. (Image: Hand holding a glass of water. Credit: Charlotte Ball/PA Wire)

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 Swedish correspondent Keith Moore about what the trials have found. He also speaks to professor John Pencavel, Emeritus Professor of Economics, at Stanford University, and finds that reducing working hours may not be as radical idea as it first appears. (Photo: A business man carries a black briefcase)

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, Dara Cohen from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, researcher Phyllis Kimba and Aisha Dukule from the think tank Center For Liberia's Future in Monrovia.(Photo: Liberian women and children wait for rice rations in overcrowded Monrovia, June 2003. Credit: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images)

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