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Drinking red wine is just like going to the gym, or so the internet claimed back in 2012. We look at the actual rodent research behind the headlines, the dose mismatch that makes the human equivalent impossible, and how university press offices mangle science for a viral moment.

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In 2012, a viral TED Talk promised that standing like a superhero for just two minutes would alter your hormones, boost risk tolerance, and turn you into an executive power player. The catch? The study behind it had a tiny sample of 42 undergraduates, a menu of post-hoc decisions, and an effect size that vanished the second independent researchers tried to replicate it. This week, we dive into the rise and dramatic fall of "Power Posing," unpacking p-hacking, researcher degrees of freedom, and how the Open Science movement brought down one of pop psychology’s biggest fads.

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According to the uncorrected output of an fMRI scanner, a dead, ice-packed Atlantic salmon was actively reading human emotions. This week, we dive into Craig Bennett’s legendary 2009 Ig Nobel-winning study to explore how running 140,000 simultaneous statistical tests on pure thermal background noise can manufacture phantom brain activity out of thin air. We break down the Multiple Comparisons Problem, spatial autocorrelation, and why modern high-dimensional data analytics needs a lot more than a prayer to separate true signals from dead fish.