Science Fictions

It’s in a peer-reviewed paper, so it must be true. Right? Alas, you can only really hold this belief if you don’t know about the peer-review system, and scientific publishing more generally. That’s why, in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart break down the traditional scientific publishing process, discuss how it leads science astray, and talk about the ways in which, if we really car...

Okay, it’s time to finally answer the question: is drinking booze good or bad? Is there really a “J-curve”, such that it’s bad to drink zero alcohol, good to drink a little, and then bad to drink any more than that? What exactly is the “safe level” of alcohol consumption, and why do the meta-analyses on this topic all seem to tell us entirely different things? In this episode of The Studies Show ,...

Everyone knows your brain hasn’t finished maturing until you’re 25. That’s so well-known, in fact, that some countries (like Scotland) have built it into their criminal justice system, giving lower sentences to under-25s—even very violent ones—on account of their immature brains. But in this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss what the evidence really says about when the brain mat...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Did your schoolteacher also do the thing with the banana and the condom? It might’ve been cringe and awkward, but just ask the experts: the evidence is “clear and compelling” that sex education classes reduce the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, the transmission of STIs, and even the prevalence of sexual...

It’s one of the best-known findings of psychology research: kids who can delay gratification by not eating a marshmallow will grow up healther, wiser, and more successful. But guess what? Later studies had trouble finding the same results. What do we actually know about delaying gratification? Get ready to control yourselves, because in this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart tell the st...

We’ve now been making this podcast for a year(!). We thought we’d mark the occasion with a grossly self-indulgent look back through our favourite episodes - and our least favourites, too. We’ve still got a massive list of potential episode topics, but we always want more. Which topics would you like us to look into? Comments below are open to all. Thanks for listening. And remember: if you like Th...

Remember when they were coming to take your gas stove away? Every so often a study about the effects of air pollution on health goes viral, and we’re reminded again that seemingly innocuous objects—like your kitchen cooker—could be bad for us in unexpected ways. How bad is air pollution? And is it getting any better? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the science of air...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com We all agree that misinformation is bad. So why do we cringe when we hear prominent scientists and commentators talking about “misinformation” these days? It’s because the public discussion on misinformation bears very little relation to what we actually know about it and its effects. Ironically, some sci...

Last week’s episode covered a man-made existential risk to humanity—nuclear war. But what about natural risks? Could there, right now, be a vast asteroid sailing through space that’ll collide with Earth, sending us go the way of the dinosaurs? In this rocky episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the data on how often we should expect civilisation-destroying asteroids to hit Earth - a...

The UK has a new Prime Minister, and one of his first acts will have been to write letters to the captains of our nuclear missile submarines, telling them what to do in the event that the UK gets obliterated by a nuclear strike. But what else might happen after a full-scale nuclear war? Many scientists—most notably Carl Sagan—have theorised that nuclear war would block out the sun, destroy crops,...

This week it’s the UK General Election, and lots of other countries either have elections coming soon or have recently voted. Lots of pollsters and political scientists have been attempting to predict the outcomes - but how successful will they be? In this Studies Show election special, Tom and Stuart discuss the various quirks and downsides of opinion polls, and ask how scientific political scien...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com There’s one thing we know Viagra does very well. But what other uses does it have? Can it, as has now been claimed in three separate studies, prevent Alzheimer’s disease? In this priapic paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask if there might be something to the theory that, through some...

The criminal justice system and science are both broadly looking for the same thing - the truth. But in many cases the two don’t mix well. Whether it’s court cases that attempt to decide the truth of a scientific dispute, or the use of fingerprints, DNA, or statistics by the prosecution in a murder case, a lot can go wrong - and there’s a lot at stake. Inspired by the recent discussion, or perhaps...

To be addicted to something, you’ve got to… er, actually, what does it mean to be “addicted” to something? We all agree you can be addicted to heroin, but can you also be addicted to videogames, or sex, or listening to podcasts? And actually, it turns out we don’t all agree you can be addicted to heroin - or, at least, people have very different models of what that means. In what is effectively an...

Should you avoid giving your child peanuts to ensure they don’t develop an allergy? If you’d asked medical authorities this question in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d get an answer that’s completely opposite to what you’d get now. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the science behind the medical recommendations on peanut allergy - the remarkable story of a major scie...

Many Western countries, most notably the US, had a major decline in their crime rate in the 1990s. About 20 years earlier, the US had banned the use of lead in gasoline. Perhaps you wouldn’t think those two facts are related - but many researchers think this wasn’t a coincidence. After getting distracted and doing a whole episode on lead and IQ a couple of weeks ago, Tom and Stuart get to the subj...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com 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). Are those books any good? In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart—who have both written reviews of Hari’s...

Petrol, pipes, paint: they made a whole generation duller. That’s if you believe the research on the effects of lead on IQ. By interfering with neurological development, the lead that we used to encounter routinely has left hundreds of millions of us with a tiny bit of brain damage. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the toxic effects of lead - from very obvious, high-dos...

Preventing cancer. Curing depression. Single-handedly ending the COVID-19 pandemic. Oh, and something to do with your bones. Is there anything Vitamin D can’t do? Maybe the answer is: “quite a lot”. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the claims about the wondrous powers of Vitamin D supplements - and whether any of them have any decent evidence behind them. The whole st...

We can all agree that being lonely is bad. But apparently, science shows it’s really, really bad. Indeed, being lonely is so dangerous to your health that its equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And it gets worse: we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, meaning that the health of millions is at risk. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask two questions: is there actu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com The evidence for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for young people with gender dysphoria is “remarkably weak”. That’s according to the Cass Review, a new in-depth report commissioned by NHS England. As you might imagine, the report’s conclusions have been somewhat controversial. In this paid-subscr...

Several previous episodes of The Studies Show have covered depression and treatments for it, but none have really considered what depression is . It’s time to do that. It turns out that some scientists have made serious critiques of the standard way of thinking about depression, and argue that we need a revolution in the way we measure it. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart take...

Everything is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World . That’s the new book—out on April 25 in the UK and May 7 in the US —by our very own Tom Chivers! In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart cover some of the historical sections of the book, and talk about where some of our basic ideas about probability come from (it turns out to be a weird combination of invete...

Microplastics are everywhere: there are teeny-tiny plastic particles in your drinking water, your food, your air - and perhaps even in your internal organs. How worried should you be? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the research on microplastics, covering all the reasons that the health effects of microscopic particles are not straightforward to study. They also look...

As an extra way of thanking our paid subscribers, we’re going to post some shorter episodes in addition to the usual weekly hour-long ones. This first short episode (available to everyone for free; after this they’re paid-only) is about the idea of Emotional Intelligence. Does your “EQ” matter as much as your “IQ”? How can you even test that, anyway? To listen to future short episodes, as well as...