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 inspire the readers.
That’s the journal Medical Hypotheses—or, it was. In this episode we discuss some of the maddest papers they ever published, including the one about how wearing heeled shoes causes schizophrenia and an astonishing idea about why humans get acne, and then discuss how the whole thing went wrong.
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 doubles your risk of cancer.
But are its claims as robust as you might hope? Well, you’ve listened to this podcast before, so what do you think?
This podcast is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. Find endless fascinating pieces on human progress at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Matthew Walker’s TED Talk (”Sleep is your superpower”)
* On “the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span” — the two mortality meta-analyses Guzey cites: Cappuccio et al. 2010 and the 2016 dose-response one (both U-shaped, optimum ~7 hours)
* On “more than doubling your risk of cancer” — Zhao et al.’s 2018 review in BMC Cancer (65 studies, ~1.55m participants, 86,201 cancers; central OR never above ~1.1)
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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 AIDS denial movement. Duesberg was convinced that HIV was just a harmless virus that happens to go along with AIDS, which is caused by something else entirely.
We thought it would be fun to go through Duesberg’s arguments and see how reasonable they were in the late 80s when he first made them. Alas, it turned out not to be fun at all, and was instead deeply depressing. Still, hope you enjoy!
Episode 101: Sugar taxes
Tuesday, July 14, 2026 • Duration 56:27
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 will pass that cost on to consumers, who will buy less, and hopefully get less fat and then die less often of diabetes and heart disease.
But does that actually work? We had a look at the studies behind it.
This podcast is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. Find endless fascinating pieces on human progress at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Germany’s planned tiered sugar levy — the announcement (and a bit more detail on the €0.26/€0.32-per-litre thresholds)
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Unpaywalled: The science of Johann Hari
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 • Duration 01:10:50
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 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 need to travel around the world to ensure your book becomes a New York Times bestseller.
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 read all four papers to find out.
We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who’s been listening for all this time. See you for the next hundred!
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 that explained huge chunks of variation in depression, aggression, intelligence, and many more psychological traits? How could they have written literally hundreds of peer-reviewed papers based on completely false “results”?
Well, they did. Here’s the story.
(Why 99.5? We’re putting off doing Episode 100, just so we can mark the occasion with an even better topic).
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, the journal of underrated ideas for making the world a better place. Today we talked about the new article on why Japan’s railways are so good and what other countries can learn from them. Read all their articles, for absolutely zero cost, at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* The first study on 5HTTLPR and depression, from 1996
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
Episode 99: Power posing
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 • Duration 01:13:01
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 and produced endless book sales from readers fascinated to hear how, just by adopting an expansive posture, you could revolutionise your own psychology and succeed at life.
In this episode, with the benefit of hindsight, we ask: what was that all about?
This podcast is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. In today’s episode we mentioned “The Perks of Being a Mole Rat”, Aria Shrecker’s entertaining new piece on what makes some animals live for an inordinately long time. Find it and endless other fascinating pieces on human progress at worksinprogress.co.
Show notes
* Dana Carney (not Carvey)’s 2016 letter on changing her mind about power posing
* The 1996 study about walking more slowly down the hallway after reading words to do with old people
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 won said award, the better). If so, you might want to know more about this very weird medical condition. We’ve got you covered.
In this paid-only episode, we go into the competing neurological theories of what causes Tourette’s, the troubles with diagnosing it, what if anything can be done to treat it, and whether you can “catch” it by watching too many videos on TikTok.
Become a paying subscriber at sciencefictionspod.com (or click the button below) to hear the full episode and read the full show notes.
Episode 98: Dark oxygen
Tuesday, March 17, 2026 • Duration 58:38
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 according to the scientists. This bizarre discovery seemed to upend everything we knew about the abyssal floor, had big implications for deep sea mining, and might even have helped explain the origin of aerobic life. But (and look, you know what we’re going to say here) could there have been something a little more mundane explaining the findings?
The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. On this week’s episode we talked about the new article on the genetics of cabbages, and how the wild cabbage has been selected into so many of the familiar vegetables we know today. Find this and so many more articles, all for free, at worksinprogress.co.
* The big one — Rogers et al.’s 2023 PLOS Medicine interrupted time series on English schoolchildren (the 8% relative reduction in year 6 girls; 5,234 cases “prevented”)
* Chris Snowdon’s demolition of it, including the 2013–2018 counterfactual buried in the supplementary material
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