This is Planet Money from NPR.

Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.

Mary Childs.

Yes, you and I took a little trip up to Scenic Montreal, one of the jewels of French Canada, for a little Planet Money mission.

Yes, we did.

And even though it was a little bit sad that that mission did not entail joining the maple harvest or, you know, like infiltrating a Putin cartel.

Next time. Dare I say, next time, it did have much bigger implications for anybody and everybody whose life is impacted by science, which I think is basically all of us.

I think that's right, yeah.

We were there to meet a guy named Abel Broder.

Abel's this very energetic economics professor in his late 30s at the University of Ottawa.

And we found him bounding around the halls of this modernist school building in downtown Montreal.

He was getting ready to host an event he's become sort of famous for,

something called the Replication Games. It's getting exciting now. How are you feeling?

I'm feeling good. It's the beginning of the event, so this is the moment I'm full of energy and

full of enthusiasm. In seven hours from now, it's going to be a different conversation.

The bell is going to be tired in seven hours because at a replication game,

he is running around between 16 teams of three to five people in a kind of hackathon.

People will work all day to replicate recently published social science papers

to reproduce the results and see if the findings hold up.

Because ever since technology has made it easy to crunch data, we've been able to go back and

check old research. And turns out it wasn't great. Rerunning an old study today a lot of

the time does not yield the same result. The research no longer proves its conclusion.

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