Science Fictions

We’ve all heard of football players (that’s “soccer players” for US listeners) tearing their hamstrings, spraining their ankles, and injuring their knees. But could all that heading of the football, whether or not it causes a concussion, be having a subtler but much more damaging long-term effect on the player’s brain? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart—the latter of whom, as you...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com If you’ve ever done a diversity training session at work, you’ll almost certainly have learned about unconscious bias, microaggressions, stereotype threat, and trigger warnings. Prejudice, racism, and trauma are apparently simmering constantly, just under the surface of our conscious minds. It turns out t...

Nuclear power seems like exactly what we want: a reliable, low-carbon source of huge amounts of energy. So why does it produce less of our electricity per capita now than it did decades ago? A major reason: nuclear power suffers from very bad PR. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the ever-present safety fears surrounding nuclear power, the problems of nuclear waste, and...

Is artificial intelligence going to lead to the extinction of humanity? What would that even look like? Everyone’s got an opinion: mostly either “that sounds absolutely ridiculous” or “that sounds absolutely terrifying”. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart do something slightly different. Stuart plays the role of an AI apocalypse sceptic, and grills Tom on all the arguments about...

Thinking of giving money to charity? Maybe you should give to a charity that does cash transfers - that is, gives the money directly to low-income people with no or minimal strings attached. Many in the “effective altruism” movement, which aims to find the best ways to spend money to improve people’s lives, are big fans of cash transfers to people in developing countries. But lately, some blockbus...

If you give someone a sugar pill but convince them it’s a real medicine, they might get better because of the power of belief . That’s the standard story, anyway. But as Tom and Stuart find in this episode, the more you dig into the science on placebo effects, the more you begin to doubt that the placebo effect is some innate bodily healing process that responds to beliefs. Instead, it might all j...

On The Studies Show , we’re all about trying to get it right. But sometimes we get it wrong. Every so often, we’ll do a feedback/corrections/clarifications episode where we go back and try to correct any errors in the last few episodes, and reply to your more general feedback. This is the first one of those, covering Episodes 1-8. Our thanks go to everyone who pointed out our mistakes. Please keep...

In any given school, you’re never more than 6ft away from a poster about “growth mindset”. It’s the massively-popular idea that if you believe that people can change, you’ll put more effort into a task (like studying) and end up doing better at it. On the other hand, if you have a “fixed mindset” and think talent is innate and unchangeable, you won’t put in the effort and you’ll fail to reach your...

If you were anywhere near social media at the start of August, you’ll have seen endless claims of a massive, world-changing breakthrough in physics: the LK-99 room-temperature superconductor. In this episode, Tom and Stuart—neither of them anything approaching a physicist, so caveat emptor —discuss what a superconductor is, why it would be exciting (or not) for it to work at room temperature, and...

We’ve apparently found the culprit for the obesity epidemic, and it’s “ultra-processed foods”. They’re the plastic-wrapped, industrially-produced foods with long lists of ingredients that apparently make up 60% of the average UK diet. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart tuck in to some “hyper-palatable” research on nutrition and health, discuss the main randomised trial in this ar...

Seemingly-reliable sources give you diametrically-opposed views on vaping. Are e-cigarettes “95% less harmful” than cigarettes, or aren’t they? Are vapes gateway drugs that lead people to smoke, or are they a great way to give up smoking? Is it both? Neither? In Episode 5 of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the research on the health effects of vaping and try to answer these questions -...

You’ve surely seen the hyped news stories. Psychedelic drugs are no longer just for hippies and attendees at raves: they’re the new frontier of mental health treatment, revolutionising how we think about conditions like depression and PTSD and showing major promise in clinical trials. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into psychedelics and mental illness. They start by talk...

The WHO’s cancer-research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has decided that the commonly-used sweetener aspartame “possibly causes cancer”. It’s been added to a long list of chemicals, activities, and occupations that are in some way carcinogenic. Apparently. But the list is really stupid. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask about the point of this...

Every so often a new study appears that claims that breastfed children are smarter, healthier, or otherwise better off later in life than those who were fed baby formula. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into one recent such study, and ask what the research in general tells us about the apparently-dramatic effects of breastfeeding. Should you feel terribly guilty if you ca...

In this first episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the new wave of weight loss drugs (like semaglutide), and the weird, often irrational arguments that people make against them. “New, effective drugs will help people lose lots of weight and this is a good thing” doesn’t sound like it should be a controversial statement, but as this episode shows, it really is. The Studies Show is s...