Journalist and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild (no relation) sorts out myth from reality to find the truth about the long history of Rothschild conspiracy theories and their spreaders. Is any of it actually true? And why, even as their wealth and influence have waned, do they continue to drive conspiracies and hoaxes?

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

What would happen to dogs if humans simply disappeared? Would dogs be able to survive on their own without us? A Dog’s World imagines a posthuman future for dogs, revealing how dogs would survive—and possibly even thrive—and explaining how this new and revolutionary perspective can guide how we interact with dogs now.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini goes in search of the true roots of gendered oppression, uncovering a complex history of how male domination became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

Why can’t we think straight when hungry? What’s the point of nightmares? And why can’t we forget embarrassing memories?
Emotions can be a pain. After losing his dad to Covid-19, Dean Burnett found himself wondering what life would be like without them. And so, he decided to put his feelings under the microscope – for science.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

In this talk, Dr Lou Safra will present the key findings on first impressions and stereotypes offered by cognitive science. By presenting the main experimental designs that are used to product these results, she will question the limits and issues of this research and discuss how we can ensure a safe use of these results.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

The wellness industry has become ever more popular in an age where chronic illnesses can go undiagnosed for years and access to medical support for mental ill-health is either prohibitively expensive or subject to long wait times. Women and other marginalised people are sometimes dismissed or overlooked in healthcare. But does the wellness industry really provide answers? Is there really a solution to “wellness”?

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

How does food make you feel? We need food to survive, but often we don’t stop to think about why we eat the way we do. From birth, we are shaped by our early psychological environment, which ultimately affects what, where, when, and why we eat. Are your parents really to blame for everything? Can you actually eat your way out of depression? Or is it perhaps a bit more complicated than that?

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

One of the characteristics of language is that there is no relationship between the way that words sound and their meaning. In this talk, Dr Shiri Lev-Ari will discuss cases where the sounds of words are not arbitrary, show what characterises the sounds of swear words across the world’s languages, discuss which languages have more words whose sounds express their meaning, and why, and show that our intuition regarding whether the sounds of certain words express their meaning can be very wrong.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.

Scientific approaches to understanding reproductive choice typically position decision-makers as rational. What is missing is a description of the internal, psychological process when someone is making a choice about their reproduction, their family constellation, and their future. Are these choices rational? Do people really view children as a calculus of financial gains and losses? We explore these questions by emphasising the role that our social world plays in shaping our reproductive decisions and attitudes.

This event will be online, on the Skeptics in the Pub Twitch channel.