Heart deaths, Organised crime and Gender data...

What does it mean if you say that something is an epidemic? In the case of a virus, it usually means that it is spreading rapidly and that more and more people are getting infected. When a disease isn’t on the rise but is there in a population at a reasonably steady level, we ten ...  Show more

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. On the programme:Last week, Annunziata Rees-Mogg took to X to post a claim about the proportion of sex offences in Dorset that are committed by asylum seekers, writing that “asylum seekers make up 0.8% of Dorset’s populati ...  Show more

The chief scientist for the World Health Organisation acknowledges the frailty of the official numbers. Ed Butler speaks to Anthony Masters, the statistics ambassador for the UK's Royal Statistical Society who explains that one way to try to count the number of deaths is through ...  Show more

In the US - but increasingly in other countries too - cold case murder, sexual assaults, and unidentified person cases once thought unsolvable are being cracked thanks to the proliferation of public genetic databases. But with this success come deep worries for our DNA data. Ivan ...  Show more

The UK is the fraud capital of the world with hundreds of thousands of victims and billions of pounds stolen every year.

Every minute of 2022, thieves stole £2300 from bank and credit card accounts. They took a total of 1.2 billion from nearly 3 million people. In this ...

The number of people falling victim to fraud involving cryptocurrency has more than doubled between 2020 and 2023 according to Action Fraud. The value of such fraud has also increased. Our reporter Dan Whitworth has met one such victim, an 86 year old in South Wales who lost over ...  Show more