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How Many Words Do You Need to Speak a Language?

How many words do you need to speak a language and how many do native speakers use?

• 9 mins

Running at the World Cup

Is it strange that Russian football players have run such big distances?

• 9 mins

Are There More Stars Than Grains of Beach Sand?

Stars vs Sand. We work out who wins the ultimate cosmic battle.

• 9 mins

Should We Have Smaller Families To Save The Planet?

Having one fewer child could be the biggest thing you do to reduce your carbon footprint

• 9 mins

How to Cycle Really Fast

How much better are the pros than the rest of us and how effective is slipstreaming?

• 9 mins

Getting Creative with Statistics

How big are your testicles and what does that mean?

• 9 mins

Carbs, Sugar and the Truth

Does a baked potato contain the equivalent of 19 cubes of sugar?

• 9 mins

Numbers Behind a Tweetstorm

How do you get a hashtag to trend around the world?

• 9 mins

Are Wildfires Really Burning More Land?

Are Wildfires in the United States and Southern Europe burning more land than before?

• 9 mins

Automated Fact-checking

Computer programmes are being developed to combat fake news.

• 9 mins

How well do you understand your world?

Tim Harford talks to Bobby Duffy about why we are often wrong about a lot of basic facts

• 9 mins

The safest car in the world?

A listener asks whether his Volvo is the safest car on the road

• 9 mins

DNA: Are you more Chimp or Neanderthal?

Is our DNA more chimp or Neanderthal?

• 9 mins

Trump and the Puerto Rico Death Toll

How can we calculate excess mortality after a natural disaster?

• 9 mins

Surviving the Battle of Britain

Were Spitfire pilots killed after an average of four weeks in the World War Two battle?

• 9 mins

Why are Lesbians More Likely to Divorce than Gay Men?

Tim Harford talks to economist Marina Adshade about same-sex divorce statistics.

• 9 mins

Paul Romer and William Nordhaus’ Big Ideas

The economists tackling climate change and growth

• 9 mins

Foreign Aid: Who’s The Most Generous?

In foreign aid terms what’s the best way of measuring how generous a country is?

• 9 mins

Vaccines: The Importance of The Herd and Social Media

What proportion of a population needs to be vaccinated to stop a disease spreading?

• 9 mins

Timing a Tsunami

How fast do Tsunamis travel?

• 9 mins

Do Assassinations Work?

How likely are assassination attempts on heads of state to succeed?

• 9 mins

When’s a Kilogram Not a Kilogram?

Updating the kilogram.

• 9 mins

Are 90% of War Fatalities Civilians?

Xavier Zapata examines what the data tells us about the deadly impact of war on civilians

• 9 mins

Sex and Heart Attacks

Are women more likely to die from a heart attack than men?

• 9 mins

Lennon or McCartney?

How statistical modelling can work out which Beatle wrote which song

• 9 mins

Dam Lies and Statistics

Are mega-dams really sustainable?

• 9 mins

Mission: Impossible - Quantifying Santa

What to look out for on Christmas Eve

• 9 mins

Numbers of the Year Part One

The numbers that made 2018

• 9 mins

Numbers of the Year Part Two

Helena Merriman with numbers about water shortage, plastic recycling and American jobs

• 9 mins

The Mathematics of Fever

We look at the numbers behind body temperature – what is normal?

• 9 mins