Science Fictions

Ranking history

About the show

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…

• 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…