One in two of us will suffer with cancer in our lifetime and almost all of us have some experience of the disease. But do we really know what cancer is and how we can work towards a cure? Is a cure even possible? And how can we arm ourselves with the right information to help us prevent and treat cancer?

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

For most of history, a patient meeting a doctor was probably harmed rather than helped. We'll look at biological and psychological factors that let medical treatments persist for centuries with no beneficial effects, and if the benefits of treatments might lie not in what they do to your body, but in what they communicate to others about your need for care.

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

While evolution is accepted by skeptics, evolutionary psychology is far less so. Lindsey explores some of the good scientific work in this area, as well as common misconceptions about — and misuses of — the evolutionary framework as applied to human psychology.

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

What is the meaning of life? Dr Caspar Addyman once wrote to every philosopher in the UK to ask them. Their answers were meagre and dispiriting. One even included a death threat. Since then, he’s moved on to study why babies have such a great time being babies. The secret of babies happiness fits in nicely with the very best answers to the meaning of life.

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

Back in the 1980s, many people came to believe in an international network of powerful individuals who regularly engaged in rituals involving Satan worship, human and animal sacrifice, group sex, paedophilia, forced abortions, cannibalism, and so on. This talk will discuss some of the lessons that we should learn from the Satanic Panic – and the very real possibility that it could happen again.

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

Based on his new book, Professor Rory O’Connor will try to dispel myths around suicide and to describe the complex set of factors that can lead to it, drawing from the Integrated Motivational-Volitional Model of Suicide. The talk will also include an overview of what we can do to support those who are vulnerable.

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

If you have cancer and you live in a low or middle-income country, you’re unlikely to have access to the radiotherapy treatments that patients in higher-income countries take for granted. A global collaboration is aiming to change the current status quo.

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

This summer’s protests over the police killings of George Floyd and other African American citizens have refocused the nation’s attention on the problem of abusive policing and its connection to larger issues of racial justice. The protesters’ demands raise a question: Can the police be reformed?

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

The BBC’s first-ever specialist disinformation and social media reporter, Marianna Spring, has spent the past year down the online conspiracy rabbit hole, investigating the real-world impact of disinformation being shared on social media. What’s it like speaking to the victims and leaders of these online conspiracy networks – and what’s the best approach?

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

The current pandemic is notable for the vast traffic in official and unofficial information and claims. David will offer some personal insights into the challenges of trying to bring some illumination to the statistics about the pandemic, illustrated with some examples of things that have gone fairly well, and communication disasters.

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