HeyJaredScience Fictions
A weekly podcast about the latest scientific controversies, with Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie sciencefictionspod.substack.com
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- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Aug 11, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 14, 2026
Latest episodes
Paid-only episode 30: Cancer screening (opens the original)
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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. Former Top Gear presenter and current farmer Jeremy Clarkson recently went viral for saying exactly this about prostate cancer—in fact, he said you should lie to your doctor just to get the test. But it’s not quite as straightforward. In this paid-only episode, we
Episode 103: Medical Hypotheses (opens the original)
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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
Episode 102: Why We Sleep (opens the original)
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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 worksi
Paid-only episode 29: HIV/AIDS denial (opens the original)
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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 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
Episode 101: Sugar taxes (opens the original)
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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 magazi
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