Whether it’s people giving themselves goat blood transfusions in an effort to maintain their youth, or yet another influencer telling you to buy XYZ miracle supplements, anti-ageing is big business. In the first part of what will surely become a longer Studies Show series, Tom and Stuart look at the evidence for a few supposed “breakthrough” treatments that can slow down ageing: rapamycin, metformin, winding back the epigenetic clock, and calorie restriction. The Studies Show is brought to you b...
Jun 24, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Would you like to do 80% of your current job but for 100% of the pay? Well, of course you would. But would it be good for the economy? It’s been suggested that companies who move to four-day working weeks have happier, less frazzled employees and no noticeable loss in productivity. Some people even claim their productivity goes up! In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart explore the theory and the evidence on the four-day week. There are some ridiculously overblown claims here, but ...
Jun 17, 2025•50 min
We all hate “urban decay”—graffiti, litter, boarded-up buildings. But does urban decay cause crime? That’s the premise of the “broken windows” theory: seeing a dilapidated and poorly-maintained physical environment emboldens criminals. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the history of, and the evidence for, broken windows theory. The theory has inspired social psychologists, criminologists, and others to do an awful lot of studies—and as we’ll discover in this episode, ...
Jun 10, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Hello everyone! Thanks to Tom’s holiday and Stuart’s job we weren’t able to record this week, so we’ve put out a classic paid episode to tide you over. We hope this goes some way to scratching your Studies Show itch. 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...
Jun 04, 2025•56 min
Can adults still grow new neurons in their brains? You’d think we might know the answer to the question of adult “neurogenesis” after more than half a century of neuroscience research. But it turns out we don’t. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the suprisingly controversial question of adult neurogenesis. Are you “stuck with” the number of brain cells you had as a child, or can you add to that number by making the right choices as an adult? And does it even matter? ...
May 28, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Do you know anyone who has extremely intense relationships—one minute totally in love with someone; the next, flying into a rage and calling them the worst person ever? It’s possible that they have borderline personality disorder. Whatever that is. What is a “personality disorder”, anyway? How is one diagnosed? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss a disorder that gets a lot of attention online, but which seems pretty tricky to define. And it’s somehow both surprising and ...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 3 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Did you miss our live show last week? Good news if you happen to be a paid subscriber: we’re posting the audio in full. Listen as we’re joined by Jesse Singal from Blocked and Reported to discuss the strange “science” of Multiple Personality Disorder (or is it Dissociative Identity Disorder?), as well as digging into the methods of a deeply flawed paper on “top surgery” for gender-dysphoric youth. To listen t...
May 13, 2025•9 min
The Studies Show LIVE (with special guest Jesse Singal) is this week! Friday 9 May, Conway Hall, London, 8pm. Get your tickets AT THIS LINK or at bit.ly/tss_live . Welcome to a new series of The Studies Show , all about parenting. We’ll cover the weird claims, fads, and controversies about how you should raise your kids. In this first episode, which focuses on infancy, we cover some feeding-related topics (an update on breastfeeding, the question of sterilising baby bottles, and the idea of baby...
May 06, 2025•1 hr 18 min
The Studies Show LIVE (with special guest Jesse Singal) is next Friday, 9th of May, at Conway Hall in London. Get your tickets right HERE ! Or go to bit.ly/tss_live . Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can’t be wrong about literally everything , can he? His latest controversial statement is that he wants to find the “environmental exposure” that has been causing the huge spike in autism rates over the past few decades. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into whether there really is an...
Apr 29, 2025•55 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Some scientific controversies are quite surprising (why would the shape of the Earth be controversial, for example?). But some aren’t. The controversy surrounding circumcision—which involves disputed medical science, bodily autonomy, children, disease, religion, sex, tradition, family, and, of course, genitalia—is about as fiery as it gets. In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discus...
Apr 22, 2025•10 min
Don’t forget THE STUDIES SHOW LIVE—on 9 May in London! You can buy tickets at this link , or by going to bit.ly/tss_live . What’s going to be the next pandemic? For a long time you might’ve seen news stories about the current threat of H5N1 bird flu, but you probably haven’t paid much attention. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart try and work out how worried we should be. Are COVID-scarred people freaking out over nothing? Or are we at the start of something much scarier? The S...
Apr 15, 2025•55 min
While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take. If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber, and beware: Awake, awake! …or so said William Shakespeare—about whom there are quite a few conspiracy theories, now we come to think of it. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart do their best to waken you from your own slumber and open your eyes to the psychology of conspiracy theories. Why do people believe them? How do you even define a conspiracy theory? And is...
Apr 08, 2025•1 hr 11 min
The Studies Show LIVE! Get your tickets for our live show in London on Friday 9 May at this link . Blaze it up! It’s time for an episode on cannabis. And just to be clear, not “on cannabis”, but “on, as in about , cannabis”. What’s the evidence that this incredibly popular drug will lower your IQ? What about the question of whether it causes psychosis? In this toked-up episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart try to find out—and gracefully refrain from any “drug humour” while doing so. The S...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 3 min
The Studies Show. Live. In London. With Jesse Singal. Talking about controversial science. Friday 9 May 2025. What more need we say? Well actually, we say a bit more in this brief podcast. Get your tickets HERE! Or go to bit.ly/tss_live . See you there! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe...
Mar 31, 2025•9 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com As if the basic “pro-life vs. pro-choice” issue wasn’t controversial enough, there’s been a decades-long scientific debate on the impact of abortion on mental health. Does getting an abortion cause a lifetime of depression? Or do most women think that in retrospect it was the correct choice? As it happens, this issue opens up some massive questions about meta-analysis, bias, and the impact of legal threats on...
Mar 25, 2025•11 min
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. thinks that seed oils—like sunflower or soybean oil—are causing terrible damage to people’s health. And now he’s the US Health Secretary (wait, what?!) we should probably take him seriously. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart trace the origins of the idea that seed oils are uniquely unhealthy, and look at all the best evidence from randomised trials on whether it’s remotely true. The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine , where you can ...
Mar 11, 2025•57 min
Whether it’s the 1903 New York Times article that claimed a flying machine was ten million years away, or the record executive who (allegedly) told the Beatles in the early 1960s that guitar bands were on the way out, predictions are hard . In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the psychologist Philip Tetlock’s research on superforecasters, the people who make the most accurate predictions of all. Even if you can’t become a superforecaster yourself, it turns out there’s a ...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Beginning in 2016, diplomats at the US Embassy in Havana started reporting strange concussion-like symptoms, even though they hadn’t taken a blow to the head. Some claimed they’d been the victim of a mysterious “sonic weapon”, aimed at them from somewhere outside and accompanied by a loud, high-pitched noise. Several scientific papers followed that appeared to confirm they’d been attacked. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart tell the whole story of Havana Syndrome, and dare to t...
Feb 25, 2025•52 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com It’s been five years since the start of the COVID pandemic (yes, you read that correctly— five years ). And the debate still rages online—did the virus come from a wet market, maybe via a pangolin, or from a gain-of-function experiment in a biolab? In this paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart cover the lab leak hypothesis, and talk about what it means for how people should make their minds u...
Feb 18, 2025•11 min
Every so often there’s a controversy related to IQ. The latest was caused by [checks notes] the new Vice President of the US attacking the IQ of a political podcaster on Twitter. You could argue that the VP should have better things to be doing. But Tom and Stuart certainly don’t, because they’ve recorded a whole episode of The Studies Show on the science of IQ. Hasn’t IQ been debunked as a measure? Does anyone take it seriously in 2025? Doesn’t an IQ test only tell you how good you are at doing...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 15 min
It had to happen eventually: this week The Studies Show is all about philosophy. As we look at science in general, how do we decide what those studies are actually showing? Tom and Stuart take a look at the Big Two of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with their respective theories of falsificationism and paradigm shifts. Both are theories that almost everyone interested in science has heard of—but both make far more extreme claims than you might think. The Studies Show is spon...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Before the panic over social media—but after the panic over “video nasties”—was the panic over violent videogames. Was Pac-Man causing little Johnny so much frustration that he’d take it out on his siblings with his fists? Was Doom secretly training little Timmy to be a school shooter? You don’t hear so much about videogames and violence any more, but if you look at the studies (and the critiques of those studies) there’s a lot to learn about where science can go wrong. In this episode of The St...
Jan 28, 2025•1 hr 5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Is recycling worthwhile? Is sending your rubbish to landfill actually so bad? Grab your cotton tote bag and join Tom and Stuart as they look at the evidence—and the intense political debate and even conspiracy theories—over the surprisingly controversial topic of recycling. This is a paid-only episode, and to hear the whole thing (and read the show notes), you’ll need to become a subscriber to The Studies Sho...
Jan 21, 2025•11 min
We want scientists to be paragons of objectivity. At the very least, we want them to tell us who’s paying their bills. But it turns out that in some fields of research, the norms about reporting financial conflicts of interest are all over the place. Scientists making big money from after-dinner speeches about their research often don’t think it’s at all relevant to disclose. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the evidence on how funding affects the outcomes of scientif...
Jan 06, 2025•1 hr 7 min
This week, as a gift for New Year’s Eve, we’re opening up a previously-paywalled episode so that everyone can listen. It’s our episode from April 2024 on “Youth gender medicine & the Cass Review”. Since the show notes were previously behind the paywall, they’re copied below. If you’d like to listen to all our paywalled episodes—which are of course ad-free, like this one—you can subscribe by visiting thestudiesshowpod.com . Normal service will be resumed next week. Happy New Year! Show notes ...
Dec 31, 2024•1 hr 15 min
In this final episode of 2024, Tom and Stuart talk about the most exciting scientific breakthroughs of the year… but temper it with some of the worst episodes of scientific fraud and misconduct, too. Then, just as a bonus, they address some of the biggest errors made in episodes of The Studies Show in 2024, too. Thank you so much for listening in 2024. If you aren’t one already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the podcast and get access to all the episodes. In any case, we’...
Dec 24, 2024•1 hr 6 min
In this “fun”, festive episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss two ways—one man-made, one natural—that our species might be wiped off the planet. The first is “mirror life”, a science-fiction-sounding threat that hardly anyone had heard of until last week, when a group of concerned scientists wrote an open letter arguing that this is a technology that should never be developed. The second is the eruption of a supervolcano, which has a scarily high likelihood of happening in the next...
Dec 17, 2024•1 hr 5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Rather unexpectedly, the idea of separate sports for males and females has become massively controversial—a major flashpoint in the culture wars, and even in the recent US election. So what does the evidence say? Is it fair if trans women (who are biologically male) compete with females in sports like swimming, or even boxing? How much sporting performance does a lifetime of testosterone grant you? In this pa...
Dec 10, 2024•11 min
Patrick Bateman. Hannibal Lecter. Ted Bundy. The guy who used to live downstairs from me. Psychopaths, every one. Except defining psychopathy, let alone measuring it, turns out to be surprisingly controversial among psychologists and forensic scientists. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the latest attempts to define and model psychopathy, the evidence on the questionnaires used to measure it, and whether The Sopranos was right in saying that therapy only makes psychop...
Dec 03, 2024•58 min
Among patients hospitalized for COVID, smokers had better outcomes. Among people with cardiovascular disease, those with obesity live longer. Among NBA basketballers, taller players don’t do any better. These are all facts. But the interpretation you might immediately draw is completely wrong. It turns out that these findings (and many more) might be due to the weird and under-discussed phenomenon of “collider bias”. Everyone who’s interested in scientific methods knows what a confounder is—but ...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 1 min
