🎙️ Listening to The Studies Show podcast.

A couple of science writers I’ve followed for a while, Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie, get together once a week to discuss some vaguely controversial scientific issue.

Are there studies supporting the clickbait headlines? What do the research papers cited by reporters and authors in support of a proposition actually say? Were they any good in the first place?

To give a flavour of what goes down, their first few episodes were about the GLP-1 anti-obesity drugs, breastfeeding, aspartame and psychedelics.

It’s not overly hard going. If you have a passing interest in reading newspaper science sections or popular science books then you’ll do fine here.

What I have to call out for special credit is that the shownotes from each episode give the actual references and links to the papers they discuss. Of course this shouldn’t be remarkable for a podcast that is entirely about scientific studies. But there seem to be many other ‘science’ shows out there that make it unnecessarily challenging to figure out exactly where they’re pulling their information from that, even now, it’s a real treat to see the sources shared up-front