Science Fictions

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Most people think it’s obvious that you should wear a helmet when cycling. It might save your life if you fall off and hit your head. Duh. But over the years, many contrarian arguments have pushed back against this seemingly-obvious point. What if people engage in “risk compensation”, where they cycle mor...

We all love to cite meta-analyses. They’re the review studies where scientists take every single piece of research ever published on a particular question, and then calculate the overall “true” effect across all of them. Putting together all those studies is a much better way to get to the truth… isn’t it? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart give a intro to meta-analysis, and then...

Don’t worry, it’s nothing important this week - only the origin of all life on planet Earth . No biggie. Sure, life evolved by natural selection, but to get evolution going, you need to have life in the first place. So where did it come from? Scientists have theories about “abiogenesis” - the moment around 3.5 billion years ago when, having never existed before, biology began. In this episode of T...

The discourse has once again turned to a feverish discussion of cognitive decline. Which 2024 US Presidential candidate has it worse? What does that mean for the campaign and for the Presidency in general? In this episode of The Studies Show , your rapidly-ageing hosts look at some of the research on cognitive ageing and cognitive decline. What happens when you give cognitive tests to people of di...

Mistakes were made. By us. In this Mea Culpa episode we discuss several of them, big and small, from multiple previous episodes. If you’ve noticed us make a mistake on The Studies Show , please do get in touch on thestudiesshowpod@substack.com, and we’ll include it in a future Mea Culpa! Show notes * Eiko Fried’s research on the definition of depression (we’ll do a whole episode on this!) * The ne...

Remember when the airwaves were full of people questioning the idea of man-made climate change? You don’t hear much from them any more - in large part becuase the evidence that our CO2 emissions are altering the climate has become so overwhelming. After a recap on how we know that carbon warms the climate, Tom and Stuart use this episode of The Studies Show to discuss climate predictions—er, I mea...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Hans Eysenck was one of the biggest names in psychology. Was he also a scientific fraudster? Long after his death, allegations resurfaced about his late-career studies, which either contained some of the most impressive findings in medical history, were a terrible mistake… or were the result of something...

Okay, whether exercise is good isn’t really in question. But there are so many pseudoscientific myths surrounding sports and exercise that it’s always worth looking more closely at some of the claims. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into two widely-believed claims about exercise. First, does stretching your muscles before exercising actually help you in any way? Second, d...

What treatment works best for people with depression? Is it psychodynamic psychotherapy, in the Freudian tradition, with its emphasis on hidden, unconscious desires? Or is it Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, based on more contemporary (and less, y’know, made up) ways of thinking about psychology? How do you even do a good study on something as complicated as psychological therapy, anyway? In this ep...

Everyone seems to have decided that it’s the phones. That is, they’ve decided that heavy smartphone and social-media use is to blame for the current wave of mental illness, despair, and depression that’s affecting young people - teenage girls in particular. Except… we need to ask how strong the evidence is. What do the studies actually show about what’s causing the mental health crisis? And, wait...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com Either there are massive differences between the brains of men and women, or there aren’t any notable differences at all - and people who think differences exist are “neurosexists”. It’s easy to find well-qualified scientists making each of these arguments. They can’t all be right. What’s going on? What d...

Why do some people love parties and others prefer to stay at home with a book? Why do some people worry endlessly about all the bad things that might happen, while others breeze through life with supreme confidence? Why is Stuart such a nice guy and Tom far less so? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss personality and the personality tests that are supposed to measure it. T...

It’s mentioned on the podcast pretty much every week. But what does “statistical significance” actually mean? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart start 2024 off with the most exciting subject possible: p -values. THRILL as they discuss statistical misconceptions! MARVEL as they talk about how “effect size” differs from “statistical significance”! CHUCKLE as they resort to endless...

We admit it: The Studies Show tends to be quite negative. We’re always complaining about low-quality studies, faulty reasoning, and bad science. Not this time! In this end-of-year special, Tom and Stuart discuss the good science news from the past year, covering all the coolest technologies and most life-saving medical advances from 2023. See you in 2024 - oh, and pre-order Tom’s book on Bayes ! C...

Every so often there’s a panic in the media: sperm count is declining! The human race is on the way out! New studies regularly appear that seem to support this idea. The recent book Count Down by epidemiologist Shanna Swan argued vociferously that the culprit is plastic pollution, which apparently releases endocrine-disrupting chemicals that ruin our fertility. Is any of that true? What do the met...

If you were to list the top 5 most hyped areas of science right now, the microbiome would clearly be one. The collection of billions of microbes that live in our gut—and which are studied by collecting, er, “stool samples”—have been blamed for causing not just gastrointestinal symptoms, but even mental health disorders. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the microbiome: w...

“Science is political”. How could it not be? It’s done by humans, whose political biases will influence not just the topics they choose to study but also how they study them. But does that mean it’s fine for scientists to blatantly bring their politics into their work? Does that mean it’s okay for scientific journals to endorse political candidates? In this slightly unusual episode of The Studies...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com It’s November, so a strange subset of “very online” men are trying to avoid, er, “self-abuse” for the entirety of the month. They’re doing it because they believe it has all sorts of psychological and health benefits. But others argue that No Nut November could itself cause you harm. Who’s right? In this...

Teaching kids how to read is amazingly controversial. Or at least, it was controversial until recently, when we achieved a proper scientific consensus that the best way to teach them is to use systematic phonics . This method has seen big successes here in the UK, and is helping thousands of children achieve proper literacy. …that’s the story, anyway. But how strong is that scientific consensus? W...

Here’s another brief episode covering the errors we’ve made in our last few episodes, from the very minor to the somewhat more serious. We’re grateful to listeners who pointed these out - please keep doing so! If you’ve noticed an error on The Studies Show , let us know and we’ll correct it on a future episode like this. Contact details are on the About page. Show notes * UNSCEAR numbers on birth...

The thesis of Johann Hari’s bestselling 2022 book Stolen Focus is that tech companies—via the internet, smartphones, and social media—are wrecking our attention spans. Hari argues that Facebook, Apple, and all the rest, in their deliberate attack on our ability to concentrate, are doing huge damage to the human species. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart (whose microphone sounds...

What causes Alzheimer’s? The main theory is that it’s due to a build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain. But some scientists think that’s hopelessly wrong, and that a hidebound belief in the amyloid hypothesis is stopping us from finding a cure. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart talk about the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, ask whether all the hype over the three recent Alzh...

Welcome to a very spooky episode of The Studies Show, on the topic of parapsychology. Tom and Stuart discuss telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and more, and look at some of the most recent attempts by scientists to show that these weird—and did we mention spooky ?—psychic phenomena are real. Can it really be the case that studies claiming the existence of psychic powers get published in mains...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com If you catch COVID, what’s the chance the symptoms will last for months? And what’s the chance they’ll be so debilitating that they ruin your life? Different studies have given wildly different answers to these questions - in part because they define “Long COVID” in all sorts of different ways. In this pa...

With major (alleged!) misconduct cases happening at some of the biggest US universities, scientific fraud has been in the news a lot recently. If you’re a scientist you’re supposed to be discovering the truth - so why do some scientists (allegedly - please don’t sue us!) just make all their results up? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss some outrageous instances of scient...