Science Fictions

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks that seed oils—like sunflower or soybean oil—are causing terrible damage to people’s health. And now he’s the US Health Secretary (wait, what?!) we should probably take him seriously. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart trace the origins of the idea that seed oils are uniquely unhealthy, and look at all the best evidence from randomised trials on whet...

Whether it’s the 1903 New York Times article that claimed a flying machine was ten million years away, or the record executive who (allegedly) told the Beatles in the early 1960s that guitar bands were on the way out, predictions are hard . In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the psychologist Philip Tetlock’s research on superforecasters, the people who make the most accur...

Beginning in 2016, diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana started reporting strange concussion-like symptoms, even though they hadn’t taken a blow to the head. Some claimed they’d been the victim of a mysterious “sonic weapon”, aimed at them from somewhere outside and accompanied by a loud, high-pitched noise. Several scientific papers followed that appeared to confirm they’d been attacked. In this...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com It’s been five years since the start of the COVID pandemic (yes, you read that correctly— five years ). And the debate still rages online—did the virus come from a wet market, maybe via a pangolin, or from a gain-of-function experiment in a biolab? In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and S...

Every so often there’s a controversy related to IQ. The latest was caused by [checks notes] the new Vice President of the US attacking the IQ of a political podcaster on Twitter. You could argue that the VP should have better things to be doing. But Tom and Stuart certainly don’t, because they’ve recorded a whole episode of The Studies Show on the science of IQ. Hasn’t IQ been debunked as a measur...

It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing? Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone interested in scien...

Before the panic over social media—but after the panic over “video nasties”—was the panic over violent videogames. Was Pac-Man causing little Johnny so much frustration that he’d take it out on his siblings with his fists? Was Doom secretly training little Timmy to be a school shooter? You don’t hear so much about videogames and violence any more, but if you look at the studies (and the critiques...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Is recycling worthwhile? Is sending your rubbish to landfill actually so bad? Grab your cotton tote bag and join Tom and Stuart as they look at the evidence—and the intense political debate and even conspiracy theories—over the surprisingly controversial topic of recycling. This is a paid-only episode, an...

We want scientists to be paragons of objectivity. At the very least, we want them to tell us who’s paying their bills. But it turns out that in some fields of research, the norms about reporting financial conflicts of interest are all over the place. Scientists making big money from after-dinner speeches about their research often don’t think it’s at all relevant to disclose. In this episode of Th...

This week, as a gift for New Year’s Eve, we’re opening up a previously-paywalled episode so that everyone can listen. It’s our episode from April 2024 on “Youth gender medicine & the Cass Review”. Since the show notes were previously behind the paywall, they’re copied below. If you’d like to listen to all our paywalled episodes—which are of course ad-free, like this one—you can subscribe by visiti...

In this final episode of 2024, Tom and Stuart talk about the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the year… but temper it with some of the worst episodes of scientific fraud and misconduct, too. Then, just as a bonus, they address some of the biggest errors made in episodes of The Studies Show in 2024, too. Thank you so much for listening in 2024. If you aren’t one already, please consider be...

In this “fun”, festive episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss two ways—one man-made, one natural—that our species might be wiped off the planet. The first is “mirror life”, a science-fiction-sounding threat that hardly anyone had heard of until last week, when a group of concerned scientists wrote an open letter arguing that this is a technology that should never be developed. The se...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Rather unexpectedly, the idea of separate sports for males and females has become massively controversial—a major flashpoint in the culture wars, and even in the recent US election. So what does the evidence say? Is it fair if trans women (who are biologically male) compete with females in sports like swi...

Patrick Bateman. Hannibal Lecter. Ted Bundy. The guy who used to live downstairs from me. Psychopaths, every one. Except defining psychopathy, let alone measuring it, turns out to be surprisingly controversial among psychologists and forensic scientists. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the latest attempts to define and model psychopathy, the evidence on the questionnai...

Among patients hospitalized for COVID, smokers had better outcomes. Among people with cardiovascular disease, those with obesity live longer. Among NBA basketballers, taller players don’t do any better. These are all facts. But the interpretation you might immediately draw is completely wrong. It turns out that these findings (and many more) might be due to the weird and under-discussed phenomenon...

Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just a big crank? Well, yes. But is he nevertheless correct in his specific claims about the harms of water fluoridation? It’s long been argued that it’s no longer necessary, and that it might have the scary adverse effect of lowering children’s IQs. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the evidence. While they’re at it, Tom and Stuart ask whether...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com You might’ve noticed it: a lot of celebrities have recently been talking or writing about their diagnosis of adult ADHD. The way they discuss it, as soon as they discovered they had ADHD everything made sense: their distractibility, their difficulties following instructions, their restlessness, and so on....

In a desperate attempt to be relevant given the US Election, Tom and Stuart dedicate this episode of The Studies Show to talking about government investment in science. How bad is it if politicians cut the science budget? Exactly how much do you get back for every pound or dollar spent on science—and how is that even calculated in the first place? The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Pro...

WoooOOOOOoooOOOOOoooo, it’s that time of year again! It’s Halloween, so it’s time for The Studies Show hosts to face their fears, and read the research from one of the weirdest areas of science, parapsychology. This time it’s all about psychic mediums. What does it mean to test whether someone can talk to the dead? Are we any better at doing it now than we were 100 years ago at the height of “spir...

Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who’s best known for running the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, died last week. That’s a good excuse to discuss his legacy: what did his famous experiment tell us about the power of the situation to make normal people commit evil and sadistic acts? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart go back to the original report of one of the most famous ps...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com It’s a constant source of online controversy: surrogacy. A “medical ethics” issue like this wouldn’t usually be a case for The Studies Show , except that science is often brought into the argument. Is it really true, as anti-surrogacy campaigners claim, that both the surrogate mother and the baby suffer s...

What’s the secret of living to 100? Well, it might be living in a “Blue Zone”: one of the handful of places around the world where there are apparently loads of centenarians. Except, as has been argued recently, Blue Zones might be a load of nonsense. In this epside of The Studies Show , relative spring chickens Tom and Stuart look at some of the recent controversies in demography. Is there a limi...

There are an awful lot of things to worry about in the world. Are “superbugs” among them? That is, how worried should we be that bacteria will develop resistance to our best antibiotics, meaning infections will run rampant and even basic surgery is out of the question? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart wash their hands and then dig in to the evidence on the coming antimicrobial...

Been feeling a little strange lately? A bit impulsive, maybe? Feeling a sudden urge to get a pet cat? Sorry to say it, but maybe you’re infected with a scary mind control parasite: specifically, the paraside Toxoplasma gondii . Or… maybe not. It turns out that, despite popular belief, the supposed behavioural effects of T. gondii are supported by very weak scientific evidence. In this episode of T...

A while back, The Studies Show covered the question of whether smartphones and social media cause mental health problems. Amazingly, that podcast didn’t settle the issue, and the debate has continued—and continued rather acrimoniously. Psychologists—most notably Jonathan Haidt—are currently laying into each other, analysing, re-analysing, and meta-analysing datasets to try and work out whether “it...