Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just a big crank? Well, yes. But is he nevertheless correct in his specific claims about the harms of water fluoridation? It’s long been argued that it’s no longer necessary, and that it might have the scary adverse effect of lowering children’s IQs. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the evidence. While they’re at it, Tom and Stuart ask whether there’s evidence for several other dentistry-related claims. Regular check-ups; flossing; fillings;...
Nov 19, 2024•1 hr 3 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com You might’ve noticed it: a lot of celebrities have recently been talking or writing about their diagnosis of adult ADHD. The way they discuss it, as soon as they discovered they had ADHD everything made sense: their distractibility, their difficulties following instructions, their restlessness, and so on. But is adult ADHD a real psychiatric condition? How does it differ from childhood ADHD? And (whisper it) ...
Nov 12, 2024•11 min
In a desperate attempt to be relevant given the US Election, Tom and Stuart dedicate this episode of The Studies Show to talking about government investment in science. How bad is it if politicians cut the science budget? Exactly how much do you get back for every pound or dollar spent on science—and how is that even calculated in the first place? The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine—a journal of science, history, and technology that discusses the secrets behind human...
Nov 05, 2024•52 min
WoooOOOOOoooOOOOOoooo, it’s that time of year again! It’s Halloween, so it’s time for The Studies Show hosts to face their fears, and read the research from one of the weirdest areas of science, parapsychology. This time it’s all about psychic mediums. What does it mean to test whether someone can talk to the dead? Are we any better at doing it now than we were 100 years ago at the height of “spiritualism”? And what do the most recent results tell us about the existence of the afterlife? Happy H...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who’s best known for running the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, died last week. That’s a good excuse to discuss his legacy: what did his famous experiment tell us about the power of the situation to make normal people commit evil and sadistic acts? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart go back to the original report of one of the most famous psychology studies of all time, and then see how the experiment is looking after more than 50 years of...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr 12 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com It’s a constant source of online controversy: surrogacy. A “medical ethics” issue like this wouldn’t usually be a case for The Studies Show , except that science is often brought into the argument. Is it really true, as anti-surrogacy campaigners claim, that both the surrogate mother and the baby suffer serious physical and psychological problems, in large part caused by the traumatic separation after birth? ...
Oct 15, 2024•11 min
What’s the secret of living to 100? Well, it might be living in a “Blue Zone”: one of the handful of places around the world where there are apparently loads of centenarians. Except, as has been argued recently, Blue Zones might be a load of nonsense. In this epside of The Studies Show , relative spring chickens Tom and Stuart look at some of the recent controversies in demography. Is there a limit to the human lifespan? Did someone really live 122 years? And how could researchers not have notic...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 2 min
There are an awful lot of things to worry about in the world. Are “superbugs” among them? That is, how worried should we be that bacteria will develop resistance to our best antibiotics, meaning infections will run rampant and even basic surgery is out of the question? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart wash their hands and then dig in to the evidence on the coming antimicrobial crisis. Exactly how many deaths can we expect from untreatable resistant infections? Turns out the q...
Oct 01, 2024•50 min
Been feeling a little strange lately? A bit impulsive, maybe? Feeling a sudden urge to get a pet cat? Sorry to say it, but maybe you’re infected with a scary mind control parasite: specifically, the paraside Toxoplasma gondii . Or… maybe not. It turns out that, despite popular belief, the supposed behavioural effects of T. gondii are supported by very weak scientific evidence. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart explain. The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazin...
Sep 24, 2024•1 hr 9 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com A while back, The Studies Show covered the question of whether smartphones and social media cause mental health problems. Amazingly, that podcast didn’t settle the issue, and the debate has continued—and continued rather acrimoniously. Psychologists—most notably Jonathan Haidt—are currently laying into each other, analysing, re-analysing, and meta-analysing datasets to try and work out whether “it’s the phone...
Sep 17, 2024•11 min
It’s in a peer-reviewed paper, so it must be true. Right? Alas, you can only really hold this belief if you don’t know about the peer-review system, and scientific publishing more generally. That’s why, in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart break down the traditional scientific publishing process, discuss how it leads science astray, and talk about the ways in which, if we really cared, we could make it better. The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Their...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Okay, it’s time to finally answer the question: is drinking booze good or bad? Is there really a “J-curve”, such that it’s bad to drink zero alcohol, good to drink a little, and then bad to drink any more than that? What exactly is the “safe level” of alcohol consumption, and why do the meta-analyses on this topic all seem to tell us entirely different things? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart get very badly intoxicated—with statistics. We’re sponsored by Works in Progress mag...
Sep 03, 2024•55 min
Everyone knows your brain hasn’t finished maturing until you’re 25. That’s so well-known, in fact, that some countries (like Scotland) have built it into their criminal justice system, giving lower sentences to under-25s—even very violent ones—on account of their immature brains. But in this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss what the evidence really says about when the brain matures—and the trickiness of linking important policy decisions to the science. The Studies Show is br...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com Did your schoolteacher also do the thing with the banana and the condom? It might’ve been cringe and awkward, but just ask the experts: the evidence is “clear and compelling” that sex education classes reduce the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, the transmission of STIs, and even the prevalence of sexual abuse. In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask the inevitable questi...
Aug 20, 2024•11 min
It’s one of the best-known findings of psychology research: kids who can delay gratification by not eating a marshmallow will grow up healther, wiser, and more successful. But guess what? Later studies had trouble finding the same results. What do we actually know about delaying gratification? Get ready to control yourselves, because in this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart tell the story of yet another famous psychological study that turned out not to live up to the hype. The Studie...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 13 min
We’ve now been making this podcast for a year(!). We thought we’d mark the occasion with a grossly self-indulgent look back through our favourite episodes - and our least favourites, too. We’ve still got a massive list of potential episode topics, but we always want more. Which topics would you like us to look into? Comments below are open to all. Thanks for listening. And remember: if you like The Studies Show , please tell a friend about it! Show notes * Study showing consistent results from m...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Remember when they were coming to take your gas stove away? Every so often a study about the effects of air pollution on health goes viral, and we’re reminded again that seemingly innocuous objects—like your kitchen cooker—could be bad for us in unexpected ways. How bad is air pollution? And is it getting any better? In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look into the science of air pollution, trying to separate correlation from causality, and working out what scientists mean when...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr 5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com We all agree that misinformation is bad. So why do we cringe when we hear prominent scientists and commentators talking about “misinformation” these days? It’s because the public discussion on misinformation bears very little relation to what we actually know about it and its effects. Ironically, some scientists—misinformation researchers who should know better—are at the root of this confusion. In this epic-...
Jul 23, 2024•11 min
Last week’s episode covered a man-made existential risk to humanity—nuclear war. But what about natural risks? Could there, right now, be a vast asteroid sailing through space that’ll collide with Earth, sending us go the way of the dinosaurs? In this rocky episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the data on how often we should expect civilisation-destroying asteroids to hit Earth - and what if anything we can do about it if one is approaching. The Studies Show is brought to you by ...
Jul 16, 2024•53 min
The UK has a new Prime Minister, and one of his first acts will have been to write letters to the captains of our nuclear missile submarines, telling them what to do in the event that the UK gets obliterated by a nuclear strike. But what else might happen after a full-scale nuclear war? Many scientists—most notably Carl Sagan—have theorised that nuclear war would block out the sun, destroy crops, and maybe lead to human extinction. But it turns out this is a very controversial theory. In this ra...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 13 min
This week it’s the UK General Election, and lots of other countries either have elections coming soon or have recently voted. Lots of pollsters and political scientists have been attempting to predict the outcomes - but how successful will they be? In this Studies Show election special, Tom and Stuart discuss the various quirks and downsides of opinion polls, and ask how scientific political science really is. The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine - the best place online to...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com There’s one thing we know Viagra does very well. But what other uses does it have? Can it, as has now been claimed in three separate studies, prevent Alzheimer’s disease? In this priapic paid-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask if there might be something to the theory that, through some vascular mechanism, Viagra might slow the effects of dementia. Or is that all just a phallus… er, fallacy...
Jun 25, 2024•11 min
The criminal justice system and science are both broadly looking for the same thing - the truth. But in many cases the two don’t mix well. Whether it’s court cases that attempt to decide the truth of a scientific dispute, or the use of fingerprints, DNA, or statistics by the prosecution in a murder case, a lot can go wrong - and there’s a lot at stake. Inspired by the recent discussion, or perhaps lack of discussion, around [a criminal case nobody in the UK can talk about for legal reasons], Tom...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 2 min
To be addicted to something, you’ve got to… er, actually, what does it mean to be “addicted” to something? We all agree you can be addicted to heroin, but can you also be addicted to videogames, or sex, or listening to podcasts? And actually, it turns out we don’t all agree you can be addicted to heroin - or, at least, people have very different models of what that means. In what is effectively an hour-long clarification of a throwaway comment in a previous episode, Tom and Stuart talk through t...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Should you avoid giving your child peanuts to ensure they don’t develop an allergy? If you’d asked medical authorities this question in the late 90s and early 2000s, you’d get an answer that’s completely opposite to what you’d get now. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart discuss the science behind the medical recommendations on peanut allergy - the remarkable story of a major scientific U-turn. The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine . Their latest article, a...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 5 min
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 related - but many researchers think this wasn’t a coincidence. After getting distracted and doing a whole episode on lead and IQ a couple of weeks ago, Tom and Stuart get to the subject they intended to cover: the lead-crime hypothesis. How strong is the evidence that the presence ...
May 28, 2024•56 min
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 books any good? In this paid-subscriber-only episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart—who have both written reviews of Hari’s books—discuss Hari’s career, his sudden emergence as a science writer, and exactly how many miles you nee...
May 21, 2024•11 min
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 of us with a tiny bit of brain damage. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart look at the toxic effects of lead - from very obvious, high-dose lead poisoning to the more insidious, low-level effects that have apparently held millions of peop...
May 14, 2024•1 hr 5 min
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 Stuart look into the claims about the wondrous powers of Vitamin D supplements - and whether any of them have any decent evidence behind them. The whole story turns out to be a perfect parable for how to think about health research. 📚Buy Tom’s book, Ever...
May 07, 2024•59 min
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 in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, meaning that the health of millions is at risk. In this episode of The Studies Show , Tom and Stuart ask two questions: is there actually a loneliness epidemic? And does it make sense to compare loneliness to something as bad for you...
Apr 30, 2024•55 min
