Across 12 experiments, first names and city names paired with highly memorable faces were recalled more often than names paired with forgettable faces. Memorable scenes gave no such boost to the names linked with them.

In time-use data from countries around the world, full-time male workers in the top income quartile sleep around half an hour less per day than those in the bottom quartile, and people in richer countries sleep less on average, implying an income elasticity of sleep of about -0.04.

When megafirms standardize tasks so anyone can do the job, a calibrated model finds output per worker rises more than 25% while relative wages fall about 8%, and the large-firm wage premium shrinks from over 50% to about 30%.

Across decades of US congressional and California local races, a one-standard-deviation rise in how pronounceable a candidate’s name is went with 0.8 more percentage points of the vote in general elections, 1.4 in primaries and 0.29 in local races.

A calendar-time portfolio of analysts’ top pick stocks generated abnormal returns of 17.6% a year, outperforming buy ratings, though only institutional investors could tell the valuable picks apart when they were announced.

In a lab experiment with 240 students, those who waited 20 minutes with strangers without their phones returned 116% of what partners sent in a trust game, against 91% for those with phone access, and 82.5% versus 62.5% chatted with someone.

Ancient DNA from three Indigenous Ancestors in Canada and Argentina, dated to roughly 860 to 1,310 years ago, carried Mycobacterium lepromatosis, showing this second leprosy bacterium circulated across the Americas long before European contact.

Tracking Michelin-listed restaurants in Great Britain and Ireland from 2010 to 2020, researchers found that losing stars raised average TripAdvisor ratings by about 0.31 points, while gaining stars changed nothing, apparently because diners expect less.