More or Less

The recent TV miniseries ‘Chernobyl’ has stirred up debate online about the accuracy of its portrayal of the explosion at a nuclear power plant in the former Soviet state of Ukraine. We fact-check the programme and try and explain why it so hard to say how many people will die because of the Chernobyl disaster.Image: Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster. Credit: Getty Images

How one woman used statistics to help cope with cancer.

The hidden influences that a make a big difference to the way the world works.

Measuring happiness, university access in Scotland, plus will one in two get cancer?

Does Mount Etna produce more carbon emissions than humans? We check the numbers.

What does it mean to say that the UK is the fifth largest economy in the world?

How collecting data about the dead led the famous nurse to promote better sanitation.

The stats behind making a successful song, plus misunderstanding Victorian court records.

Data visualisation is all the rage, but where does that leave the old-fashioned values of audio? Some data visualisation experts are starting to explore the benefits of turning pictures into sound. Financial Times journalist Alan Smith plays his musical interpretation of a chart depicting the yield-curve of American bonds.Image: Human heart attack, illustration Credit: Science Photo Library

Are deaths from heart disease on the rise?This week the British Heart Foundation had us all stopping mid-biscuit with the news that the number of under 75s dying from cardiovascular disease is going up for the first time in half a century. It sounds like bad news – but is it?Does Huawei contribute £1.7billion to the UK economy?People were sceptical that the Chinese telecom company could contribute such a large amount to the UK economy. We take a deeper look at the number and discuss whether it is reasonable to include such a broad range of activities connected to the company to reach that figure. Deaths from organised crimeThe National Crime Agency (NCA) said this week that organised crime kills more people in the UK than terrorism, war and natural disasters combined. But what does the evidence say? The NCA also said that there are 181,000 offenders in the UK fueling serious and organised crime. That’s more than twice the strength of the British Army. We try to find out where those figures came from. The absence of women’s lives in dataDo government and economic statistics capture the lives of women fairly? If not, does it matter? How could things be changed? Tim Harford speaks to Caroline Criado-Perez about her new book ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.’Image: Human heart attack, illustration Credit: Science Photo Library