Science Fictions
de Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie
Episódio mais recente
Paid-only episode 30: Cancer screening
Paid-only episode 30: Cancer screening
Sobre este podcast
A weekly podcast about the latest scientific controversies, with Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie
sciencefictionspod.substack.com
Episódios
Os 20 episódios mais recentes de 145
- Paid-only episode 30: Cancer screening · 10 minThis 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…
- Episode 103: Medical Hypotheses · 1 h 16 minIt 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…
- Episode 102: Why We Sleep · 1 h 2 minIn 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…
- Paid-only episode 29: HIV/AIDS denial · 11 minThis 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…
- Episode 101: Sugar taxes · 56 minIt’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…
- Unpaywalled: The science of Johann Hari · 1 h 10 minWe 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…
- Episode 100: Replication, replication, replication · 1 h 17 minWe 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…
- Episode 99.5: Candidate genes · 1 h 13 minHere’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…
- Episode 99: Power posing · 1 h 13 minFor 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…
- Paid-only episode 28: Tourette's syndrome · 10 minThis 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?…
- Episode 98: Dark oxygen · 59 minIn 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…
- Episode 97: The 2D:4D digit ratio · 1 h 3 minThe 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…
- Paid-only episode 27: Antidepressants · 9 minThis 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 96: Electroconvulsive therapy · 1 h 13 minOpen up some scientific papers, and you’ll hear electroconvulsive therapy described as the most effective treatment for depression (especially very severe depression). But open…
- Episode 95: Critical thinking · 1 h 1 minThis 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”?…
- Episode 94: Medical marijuana · 1 h 2 minHere’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…
- Paid-only episode 26: Microplastics redux · 11 minThis 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…
- Episode 93: Many analysts · 1 h 18 minHere’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?…
- A Christmas 2025 compendium · 32 minWe’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…
- Episode 92: Oliver Sacks · 1 h 10 minSTOP 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…
