Season 1, Episode 94 · The Rest Is ScienceNew
Something Weird Is Going On With Placebos
11 Oct 2026 · 49 min
Episode notes
For the past few decades, something strange has been happening in clinical trials. Painkillers aren't getting worse, but the placebos they're tested against appear to be getting better. In one landmark study, the advantage of pain medication over placebo shrank from 27.3% in 1996 to just 8.9% in 2013. Even stranger? This trend was found almost entirely in American trials.In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) investigate the extraordinary science of the placebo effect; how our expectations influence pain, why belief can change the way our…
Podcast
The Rest Is Science
Goalhanger · Tech & Science · English
Join mathematician Professor Hannah Fry and science creator Michael Stevens (Vsauce) as they dig into the weird scientific questions that often go unexplored. Welcome to The Rest Is Science, a show that sits in the fascinating space between what we think we know, and what we actually know. Why do we assume we understand things like time, randomness, or even gravity? Once you start questioning…
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S1 · E94 · 30 Sep 2026 · 41 min
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Michael hands Hannah a kendama, the Japanese cup-and-ball toy, and asks her to land a single catch. Then he brings out one built for him by Adam Savage of MythBusters and explains why a heavier kendama is a completely different physics problem. A kendama looks like a children's toy. It is really a pendulum, a lesson in angular momentum and a catching problem borrowed from spacecraft docking. Michael and Hannah get into why the swing timing barely changes when the ball gets heavier, why the trick is to match the ball's velocity rather than grab at it, why bending your knees on the catch is…
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S1 · E90 · 27 Sep 2026 · 59 min
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What is fire, and why does watching it hold our attention in a different way from scrolling on your phone? Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens start with the science of a flame: why it glows, what its different colours reveal, and why fire is a series of chemical reactions rather than a single substance. Then they travel back to a time before wildfires could burn on Earth, and ask how early humans learned to use and make it. Could keeping a fire alive have helped our ancestors learn to plan and cooperate? And what happens when we replace the quiet pull of a hearth with the endless pull of a…
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S1 · E89 · 23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
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