Science Fictions

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com It seems like the most obvious thing in the world: if you do more cancer screening, you’ll catch tumours early and people will be better off. Former Top Gear presenter and current farmer Jeremy Clarkson recently went viral for saying exactly this about prostate cancer—in fact, he said you should lie to yo...

It sounds like a good idea in theory: a non-peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated to pure scientific creativity. Send in your craziest hypotheses and as long as they’re original ideas, the editor will publish them, and let them inspire the readers. That’s the journal Medical Hypotheses —or, it was . In this episode we discuss some of the maddest papers they ever published, including the one a...

In 2017, Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep became a huge bestseller. It said, among other things, that we are living through an epidemic of sleeplessness, that the less we sleep the sooner we die, and that sleeping less than six hours a night doubles your risk of cancer. But are its claims as robust as you might hope? Well, you’ve listened to this podcast before, so what do you think? This podcast is...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Earlier this year we lost one of the WOATs of bad science: Peter Duesberg, the Berkeley professor who originated nearly all the arguments of the AIDS denial movement. Duesberg was convinced that HIV was just a harmless virus that happens to go along with AIDS, which is caused by something else entirely. W...

It’s been a while. Thank you for sticking with us while we’ve been gone. Dozens of countries have started taxing sugary drinks over the last couple of decades. You can see the reasoning: if they cost companies more to make, then companies will pass that cost on to consumers, who will buy less, and hopefully get less fat and then die less often of diabetes and heart disease. But does that actually...

We are sorry we’ve been missing so many episodes recently! Stuart’s been busy and Tom’s been… also busy. We’re busy. Hopefully back to normal service next week. In the meantime, here’s an old paid episode, unpaywalled. Apologies. … Johann Hari is a journalist with an interesting past who has now written four very popular books on scientific topics (addiction, depression, attention, and obesity). A...

We made it: triple figures! And as luck would have it, Nature just simultaneously published four major meta-science papers that are right up our street. Aw. Thanks, Nature . You shouldn’t have. How screwed is social/behavioural science? We read all four papers to find out. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s been listening for all this time. See you for the next hundred! Show notes * The f...

Here’s another one for the annals of “entire scientific field becomes totally misguided for decades”. How could it have been possible that so many scientists fell for the idea of candidate genes—that there were individual gene variants that explained huge chunks of variation in depression, aggression, intelligence, and many more psychological traits? How could they have written literally hundreds...

For a while in the early-to-mid 2010s, the most prominent psychology research in the world was on power posing. Harvard’s Amy Cuddy did a TED talk that reached tens of millions; her exhortation to “fake it til you make it” struck a chord and produced endless book sales from readers fascinated to hear how, just by adopting an expansive posture, you could revolutionise your own psychology and succee...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Have you seen the award-winning film I Swear , about a Scottish man with Tourette’s? (The less said about what happened at the ceremony where it won said award, the better). If so, you might want to know more about this very weird medical condition. We’ve got you covered. In this paid-only episode, we go...

In 2024, researchers claimed to find something mysterious at the bottom of the ocean. It was “dark oxygen”—oxygen produced where there’s no chance of photosynthesis. So what could possibly be producing it? Natural batteries—at least according to the scientists. This bizarre discovery seemed to upend everything we knew about the abyssal floor, had big implications for deep sea mining, and might eve...

The last few episodes have been pretty heavy. So here’s… well, here’s the 2D:4D ratio. Does the difference in length between your index finger and your ring finger reveal a huge amount about your personality (and much more besides)? Perhaps you won’t be surprised by the answer. But we promise you’ll be surprised by just how much effort scientists have put into finding out… The Science Fictions pod...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com And now… following last week’s episode on ECT , here’s part two of our double episode on depression treatments. This time we’re looking at antidepressants. You’ll be delighted to hear that we immediately encounter our favourite thing—dueling meta-analyses. To hear the whole episode and read the show notes...

Open up some scientific papers, and you’ll hear electroconvulsive therapy described as the most effective treatment for depression (especially very severe depression). But open up others, and you’ll see it described as completely useless—and a sad indictment on a medical establishment who’ve completely failed to provide proper evidence on it. Not only that, but they’ve exposed patients to serious...

This episode is dedicated to Justin Eldridge . We like to think that, in often hamfisted ways, we’re applying critical thinking on this show. But what even is “critical thinking”? Can you measure it? Can you teach it to kids—or for that matter, to anyone? Can teaching critical thinking help people defend themselves against misinformation and disinformation? It would be very ironic if “critical thi...

Here’s another episode that revists a topic we’ve covered before. A while back, we did an episode on the downsides of cannabis (for example, the risk of psychosis). But of course, a lot of people claim there are medical benefits, too! Not least among them is Donald Trump, who recently re-scheduled cannabis so that it can be studied more for medical purposes. That research is sorely needed. In this...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com It’s rare that we return to a topic, but it’s also nice to have been right. In 2024 we did an episode on microplastics, and cast a lot of doubt on some of the more outrageous claims about them filling up your brain, your arteries, and (for the fellas) your testicles. Since then a lot more flaws in the sci...

Here’s a cheery one for our first episode of the year. Guess what happens when you give several sets of scientists the same dataset and ask them to answer the same question? Well, they all find the same results, right? Right!? Sadly not. This “Many Analysts” problem has been analysed and debated in multiple different scientific fields and across several papers. We cover them in this episode. What...

We’ve covered a lot of bad science stories over the year. Here are a few more. But in the optimistic spirit of the “holiday season”, the last one has a happy ending. Thanks for listening—especially if you’re a subscriber! See you in 2026. Stuart & Tom Show notes * A surge of low-quality AI papers on public datasets * A surge of low-quality AI letters to the editor * Retraction Watch story on the D...

STOP PRESS: a beloved 20th Century populariser of psychology who wrote massively successful books has been shown to be full of crap. Actually… don’t stop press. Just put it on the pile with all the others. This time it’s Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat , Awakenings , and many other books. An article in The New Yorker has shown that a lot of his case s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Does the evidence support the use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT)? Depends on when you asked the question. At one point the consensus was “yes”; more recently it reversed. But should it have? It also depends on what symptoms you’re talking about. Is HRT just all about hot flushes, or can it also trea...

Hello everyone! We weren’t able to record a podcast this week, because 1) Stuart was busy and 2) it’s Tom’s birthday. So by way of apology we’re re-releasing this one about some drama last year between Jon Haidt, sworn enemy of smartphones, and some guys who like meta-analyses. Hope you enjoy it! A while back, The Studies Show covered the question of whether smartphones and social media cause ment...

Everyone has read Entangled Life , the wonderfully-written book about fungi that took the world by storm about 5 years ago. Among many other things, it popularised the “wood wide web”—the idea that trees can communicate with one another through networks of fungi at their roots. But is the wood wide web real? It turns out scientists have some major questions. We air them on this episode. And just t...

It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker! This time it’s about some of the fundamental inspirations for the idea of cognitive dissonance —the idea that holding contradictory views in one’s head creates discomfort and a need to change one of the beliefs. So...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Creatine is the supplement of the moment, but both of us had vaguely heard that this one might actually not be total garbage. On the other hand: there are a lot of surprising claims made about it! If proponents are to be believed, it doesn’t just boost muscle mass – it reduces depression, prevents cancer,...