Science

Science Fictions

by Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie

CienciasTecnología

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Latest episodes

Paid-only episode 30: Cancer screening

August 11, 2026 · 10 min

This 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, you’ll catch tumours early and people will be better off…
Episode 103: Medical Hypotheses

August 4, 2026 · 1 hr 16 min

It 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 original ideas, the editor will publish them, and let them…
Episode 102: Why We Sleep

July 28, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

In 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 sooner we die, and that sleeping less than six hours a night…
Paid-only episode 29: HIV/AIDS denial

July 21, 2026 · 11 min

This 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 Berkeley professor who originated nearly all the arguments of the…
Episode 101: Sugar taxes

July 14, 2026 · 56 min

It’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 reasoning: if they cost companies more to make, then companies…

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Unpaywalled: The science of Johann Hari

May 12, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

We 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, here’s an old paid episode, unpaywalled. Apologies. … Johann…
Episode 100: Replication, replication, replication

April 28, 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

We 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 shouldn’t have. How screwed is social/behavioural science? We…
Episode 99.5: Candidate genes

April 21, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

Here’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 candidate genes—that there were individual gene variants…
Episode 99: Power posing

March 31, 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

For 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; her exhortation to “fake it til you make it” struck a chord…
Paid-only episode 28: Tourette's syndrome

March 24, 2026 · 10 min

This 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? (The less said about what happened at the ceremony where it…
Episode 98: Dark oxygen

March 17, 2026 · 59 min

In 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 could possibly be producing it? Natural batteries—at least…
Episode 97: The 2D:4D digit ratio

March 10, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

The 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 amount about your personality (and much more…