The mathematics of Universal Basic Income
The budget identity, the disposable-income curve, the negative-income-tax equivalence — the arithmetic under every UBI debate.
VO₂max & Longevity
48 sub-claims across 10 physiological categories — reconciled from two independent fact-checks against 83 cited sources, from Holloszy (1967) to Mandsager's 122,007-person cohort.
The protein stack,
stripped to the evidence
Whey · creatine · glutamine · EAAs — a two-tier audit of the four supplements most often stacked for muscle gain and fat loss, with effect sizes, conflicts of interest, and an honest debunk of BCAAs-as-muscle-builder.
The Incretin Decade: GLP-1,
dual & triple agonists
GLP-1, dual and triple agonists graded for evidence — the efficacy ladder, the organ-outcome dossier, what really happens to muscle, the drugs that try to spare it, and the hype the randomized trials are quietly deflating.
The ERC-4626 vault inflation attack,
defused
An attacker deposits one wei, donates a fortune, and the next depositor's shares round to zero. A figure-led reading of the donation attack on tokenized vaults — the rounding it abuses, the worked exploit traced from t4sk's reference code, and the two virtual numbers OpenZeppelin added to make the theft a money-loser.
Creatine,
stripped to the evidence
A synthesis of 685 controlled trials and ~26,000 participants — separating what creatine reliably does from industry hype and unsettled science, with a sex-specific antidepressant signal in women.
Drinking water safety in Greece
Microplastics, PFAS, fluoride and lead — graded for evidence and mapped to what actually ships to a Greek address.
Magnesium,
stripped to the evidence
Nine forms compared, three upper limits reconciled, and the L-threonate premium audited — which magnesium is worth paying for, at what dose, and where the literature is funded by people who sell it.
Do hot drinks cause cancer?
A viral chart says the hot-drink–cancer link collapses under age adjustment — and coffee is genuinely exonerated. But the headline drops the one signal that survives every control: scalding liquids and the esophagus.
Ethereum,
from the Yellow Paper to the Endgame
Gavin Wood's Yellow Paper specified a world computer as one exact equation. A decade and ~20 hard forks later — EIP-1559, the Merge, blobs, PeerDAS — almost every number has changed and the equation has not. A formal, figure-led reading of the protocol and everything that rewrote it.
Alibaba
Q4 FY26 and the AI-cloud J-curve
First operating loss since 2021, +40% external cloud, $53B+ capex. Updated 12 Aug 2026 with a new § 06: the stock fell 28% to $91.99 and came all the way back, six houses cut their targets without one rating change. The 20 August print passed the cloud test this brief set and missed on earnings. A HK$80B share placing followed.
Short video and the brain
One preregistered scan says two control regions go quiet during videos you choose to keep watching. The headline says your self-control shuts down. The paper says the opposite.
Your daily omega-3 regimen,
graded
Three multi-oil softgels plus three fish-oil caps — what 900 mg of EPA+DHA actually buys across nine health domains.
A robot vacuum that doesn't phone home
An honest buying guide for a fully-offline robot vacuum in Greece — no cloud, no account, no forced firmware. The only real path runs through Valetudo on a LiDAR Dreame/Xiaomi/Eureka you root yourself, past five years of documented leaks and around an EU rulebook that is tightening but still not enough.
Does red light therapy work?
Fifteen indications, graded one at a time. One reaches guideline strength — and it uses a probe inside the mouth. Two more are probable. Most of what the consumer market sells is unproven, and one claim has no human evidence at all.
Does omega-3 speed up cognitive decline?
A critical appraisal of a contested observational finding (Liao et al. 2026) and the viral claim it triggered.
Self-improvement by bidirectional evolutionary search
How a language model teaches itself to reason better by searching in two directions — recombining its own partial solutions forward, and decomposing the goal into checkable sub-goals backward. A figure-led reading of Xu et al. (2026).
Less protein,
more years of life?
A Greek press report says a July 2026 review shows that eating less protein adds years to human life. A common counter-claim says muscle adds them instead. Both are tested here from the primary literature — and the mechanism everyone cites has a gap exactly where the argument needs a result.
Twenty patches,
one billion cells
First-in-human engineered heart muscle in advanced heart failure — the BioVAT-HF readout, read alongside the field's graveyard and a founder's conflict of interest.
Zinc picolinate,
audited
Statistical significance, conflicts of interest, sample-size weighting and replication status across every major zinc claim.
Do food additives hurt the gut?
Carrageenan, emulsifiers, titanium dioxide, sweeteners, maltodextrin — a graded audit of the additives most accused of harming the intestine. Real, reproducible mechanism in cells and mice; thin, additive-specific, often-null human proof.
NMN & NR efficacy,
audited
A zero-bias meta-analysis of 26 randomized trials — what raising blood NAD⁺ does, and what it doesn't.
Seed oils,
butter and olive oil
The internet says seed oils are poison and butter is back. The trial record says something duller and more useful: cholesterol falls, death does not follow, and the one comparison everybody argues about has never been run.
Sodium butyrate for gut health,
audited
“Very good for the gut” — a vital colonic molecule wrapped in an overstated bottle. Separating butyrate's strong gut biology from the mixed human trials, the bioavailability wall, and the fibre that does the job better.
Cortisol supplements,
ranked
Ten agents sold for cortisol control, ranked by evidence tier, effect size and dose range. One carries two independent meta-analyses. Six rest on a single trial each.