Stories
The studies behind the headlines, explained.
Each story rebuilds the original numbers behind something people repeat about heat or cold. You can watch what was measured and see where the retelling drifted away from it.
Story · Heat
A scientific look at Bryan Johnson's sauna experiment.
Bryan Johnson spent a year and a half measuring what a daily sauna does to his body, and he posted the results as he went. We laid his tests out on one calendar and read them the way a scientist would, to see what one carefully measured person can show.
9 min readStart scrolling →
Story · Heat and cold
Watch a sauna and a lake dip work on a body minute by minute.
Sixteen adults sat through two rounds at 85°C in a lakeside sauna in Wales on two separate days. On one of those days, each break opened with a 90-second lake dip. Scroll through the session and watch their core temperature and heart rate move.
7 min readStart scrolling →
Story · Heat
Watch the verbs heat up as a sauna study becomes news.
The 2015 Finnish sauna paper found frequent sauna use was associated with fewer deaths. Scroll through the week of coverage that followed and watch each headline climb a ladder of verbs toward a promise.
7 min readStart scrolling →
Story · Cold
Most cold plunge rules come from studies that kept people cold for hours.
Cold plunge advice keeps repeating a few famous numbers. We traced each one back to its study, then plotted every study by how cold it got and how long each session lasted.
8 min readStart scrolling →