The Studies Show

The Studies Show episodes:

• 05.28.2024

  Episode 38: Lead and crime

  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...

  
• 05.21.2024

  Paid-only Episode 8: The science of Johann Hari

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 05.14.2024

  Episode 37: Lead and IQ

  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...

  
• 05.07.2024

  Episode 36: Vitamin D

  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...

  
• 04.30.2024

  Episode 35: The loneliness epidemic

  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...

  
• 04.23.2024

  Paid-only Episode 7: Youth gender medicine & the Cass Review

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 04.16.2024

  Episode 34: Does depression exist?

  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...

  
• 04.09.2024

  Episode 33: Probability (and Tom's new book)

  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...

  
• 04.02.2024

  Episode 32: Microplastics

  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...

  
• 03.29.2024

  Studies Show Short 1: Emotional Intelligence

  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...

  
• 03.26.2024

  Paid-only Episode 6: Bicycle helmets

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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....

  
• 03.19.2024

  Episode 31: The trouble with meta-analysis

  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...

  
• 03.12.2024

  Episode 30: The origin of life

  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...

  
• 03.05.2024

  Episode 29: Cognitive decline

  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...

  
• 03.01.2024

  Mea Culpa 3

  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...

  
• 02.27.2024

  Episode 28: Climate models

  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...

  
• 02.20.2024

  Paid-only Episode 5: The Hans Eysenck saga

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 02.13.2024

  Episode 27: Exercise

  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...

  
• 02.06.2024

  Episode 26: Psychotherapy

  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...

  
• 01.30.2024

  Episode 25: Is it the phones?

  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...

  
• 01.23.2024

  Paid-only Episode 4: Male and female brains

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 01.16.2024

  Episode 24: Personality

  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...

  
• 01.09.2024

  Episode 23: Statistical significance

  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...

  
• 12.29.2023

  Episode 22: Review of 2023

  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...

  
• 12.19.2023

  Episode 21: Falling sperm counts

  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...

  
• 12.12.2023

  Episode 20: The microbiome

  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...

  
• 12.05.2023

  Episode 19: Science and politics

  “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...

  
• 11.28.2023

  Paid-only Episode 3: Pornography and "No Nut November"

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 11.21.2023

  Episode 18: Phonics and the reading wars

  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...

  
• 11.18.2023

  Mea Culpa 2

  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...

  
• 11.14.2023

  Episode 17: Your shrinking attention span

  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...

  
• 11.07.2023

  Episode 16: Alzheimer's and the amyloid hypothesis

  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...

  
• 10.31.2023

  Episode 15: Halloween special on parapsychology

  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...

  
• 10.24.2023

  Paid-only Episode 2: Long COVID

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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? ...

  
• 10.17.2023

  Episode 14: Scientific fraud

  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...

  
• 10.10.2023

  Episode 13: Football and dementia

  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...

  
• 10.03.2023

  Paid-only Episode 1: Diversity training

  This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.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...

  
• 09.26.2023

  Episode 12: Nuclear power

  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...

  
• 09.19.2023

  Episode 11: The AI apocalypse debate

  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...

  
• 09.12.2023

  Episode 10: Cash transfers

  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...

  
• 09.05.2023

  Episode 9: The placebo effect

  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...

  
• 09.02.2023

  Mea Culpa 1

  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...

  
• 08.29.2023

  Episode 8: Growth mindset

  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...

  
• 08.22.2023

  Episode 7: The LK-99 superconductor, and other physics false dawns

  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,...

  
• 08.15.2023

  Episode 6: Ultra-processed foods

  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,...

  
• 08.08.2023

  Episode 5: Vaping, smoking, and popcorn lung

  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?...

  
• 08.04.2023

  Episode 4: Psychedelics and psychotherapy

  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...

  
• 08.01.2023

  Episode 3: Aspartame and the stupid list of things that cause cancer

  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....

  
• 07.28.2023

  Episode 2: Breastfeeding - what the science actually says

  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...

  
• 07.24.2023

  Episode 1: Why is Ozempic so controversial?

  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...