Podcast Episodes

Episode 85: Insectageddon

What is that? What is that!? What is it!? Augh! No! Not the bees! NOT THE BEES! AAAAAUGGGHHHHH MY EYES! MY EYES! AAAGGHHHH!!!!

This episode is about bees. And all insects, actually—are they in the pro…

Published on 8 hours ago

Episode 84: Brain training

5—6—3—4—3—1—7—2

In the first episode under our new podcast name (it’s now the Science Fictions podcast!), we ask whatever happened to all those games that claimed to tell you your “brain age”—games th…

Published on 1 week, 1 day ago

Episode 83: Dark matter and dark energy

Where is most of the universe? And why don't we know yet? Yes—we’re talking about dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious stuff that’s predicted by physical theory, but which still remains elusiv…

Published on 2 weeks, 1 day ago

Episode 82: Paper mills

In our last standard episode, we talked about retraction—removing papers from the scientific literature. Well, it turns out there’s an awful lot of retraction to do, in large part due to paper mills.…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Unpaywalled: Diversity training

We’re very sorry about the disrupted service over this summer! It’s been hectic with work and a house move and various things. To tide you over, here’s a formerly paywalled episode: our very first on…

Published on 1 month ago

Episode 81: Retraction

RETRACTED // In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss retraction, the process of removing articles from the scientific record. How often is it due to fraud? How many papers get ret…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Episode 80: Mindfulness meditation

Pay attention. Focus on your breathing. Live in the moment. Accept yourself. Do you have a self? Focus on that self. And so on. This is, of course, the practice of mindfulness meditation, which seems…

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago

Episode 79: Cancer rates

Are cancer rates going up or down? It seems like depending on where you look, you’ll find different answers to the question. What’s going on here — have some writers just got it completely wrong? Is …

Published on 2 months ago

Episode 78: Worm wars and mouth bacteria

Seconds out! Round one! Ding ding! And other boxing terms. We’ve found a topic on which Tom and Stuart actually disagree. Kind of. In this episode of The Studies Show, they use the examples of “the w…

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago

Paid-only Episode 21: Psychological sex differences

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com

Inspired by a new Nature paper on how the “maths gap” emerges between girls and boys in school, Tom and St…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago