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PODCAST

The World, the Universe and Us

From the evolution of intelligent life, to the mysteries of consciousness; from the threat of the climate crisis to the search for dark matter, The world, the universe and us is your essential weekly dose of science and wonder in an uncertain world. Hosted by journalists Dr Rowan Hooper and Dr Penny Sarchet and joined each week by expert scientists in the field, the show draws on New Scientist’s unparalleled depth of reporting to put the stories that matter into context. Feed your curiosity with the

science

All Episodes

24:58

CultureLab: Teaching science through cooking with Pia...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/12/05

Did your chemistry lessons involve baking chocolate lava cakes? Have you ever wanted to eat your biology homework? While ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ brought a fictional cooking-as-chemistry story to TV viewers this fall, real-life scientist Pia Sörensen’s students are some of the few who can actually answer “yes.”Sörensen’s directs Harvard University’s Science and Cooking program, which teaches science lessons through the culinary arts. She is the author and editor of several books, including the

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22:08

Weekly: Biggest climate summit since Paris; thanking...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/12/01

#226This year’s COP28 could be the most important climate summit since the Paris Agreement in 2015. After opening in Dubai on Thursday, this will be the first time countries will formally take stock of climate change since agreeing to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. While we can expect world leaders to make some major commitments regarding renewable energy, sceptics are concerned the location of the summit will mean that fossil fuel interests end up disproportionately shaping the

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21:34

Science of cannabis: #1 A long history and a seismic...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/28

Cannabis is having a moment. Half of the US population lives in a state where marijuana is legal, and 9 in 10 people nationwide support legalisation in some form. This is a stark difference from mere decades ago, when prohibition was the norm in the entire US. Meanwhile, if you live in Malta, Uruguay, Canada – and maybe soon, Germany – your entire country is one with legal recreational pot. And access to medical marijuana extends to even more countries, including the UK and Australia.But as medical

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24:20

Weekly: Salt glaciers could host life on Mercury;...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/24

#225Life on Mercury? That would be a shocking discovery. The planet is incredibly inhospitable to life… as we know it. But the discovery of salt glaciers on its surface has opened up the possibility that extremophile bacteria could be buried beneath its surface. Lucky then that the BepiColombo mission is planned to take another look at Mercury soon.Ever wondered why you can go all night without getting hungry but can’t last a few hours in the day? Well, there may be cells in our brains that tell us

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14:41

Dead Planets Society: #11 Cube Earth Part Two

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/22

Turning the Earth into a cube, the gift that just keeps giving. Last episode we had fish bowl spaceships, this time we have sea monsters!If you thought cubifying the Earth couldn’t get more wacky, you’re in for a treat. In the Dead Planets Society season finale, Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte are once again joined by geophysicist Mika McKinnon. This time she explains what time would be like on a 6-faced planet, how you’d be able to experience all four seasons in a single day on Cube Earth and why this

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18:06

Dead Planets Society: #10 Cube Earth Part One

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/21

This is it, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. We’ve killed the sun, smushed the asteroid belt, burrowed into other planets… but now it’s time for the big one… Earth.In this two-part season finale, Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte do irreparable damage to our planet by turning it into a cube. Joining the pair in this mammoth task is geophysicist and disaster consultant Mika McKinnon. In this first episode Mika tackles the many life-changing knock-on effects of cubifying Earth, such as how only

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28:44

Weekly: Saving the trees we already have; why US men...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/17

#224Tree planting has become an incredibly popular way of attempting to store carbon dioxide and slow global warming. But new research estimates we may be able to store huge amounts of carbon dioxide without planting any new trees at all. All we have to do is protect the ones we already have. The world’s existing forests could store up to 228 billion tonnes of carbon, but is protecting them an achievable goal?Life expectancy for everyone in the US is on the decline, but especially for men, with the

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21:02

CultureLab: Orbital - A love letter to Earth from the...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/14

As astronauts look down on Earth from space, the experience is often life-altering. The “pale blue dot” looks fragile from way up there. And in the novel Orbital, we get to see our planet from the perspective of astronauts aboard the International Space Station, giving us a glimpse into why the distant view shifts their perspectives so dramatically.The book follows the team of astronauts as they observe Earth, collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the

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26:33

Weekly: Spinal cord stimulation for Parkinson’s...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/10

#223Spinal cord stimulation has, for the first time, been used to improve the mobility of someone with Parkinson’s Disease. Marc, who has battled the condition for 30 years, once fell five to six times daily, but now is able to walk kilometres per day thanks to an array of electrodes that stimulate the movement-related neurons in his spine. Though it was successful for Marc, the treatment is also highly customised and more research is needed before it might benefit people more broadly.In the world

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15:28

Dead Planets Society: #9 Unify the Asteroid Belt

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/07

Asteroids are cool, but they’re all spread out across the solar system. Wouldn’t it be neater if we could smush them all together to make one MEGA asteroid? Maybe even an asteroid… planet.From an asteroid sausage machine to a Jell-O infused asteroid donut, Leah and Chelsea discover just how difficult and disastrous it would be to merge the asteroid belt – with one surprising silver lining. Joining them in their quest are planetary scientists Andy Rivkin of John Hopkins University, and Kathryn Volk

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26:38

Weekly: Do you really need 8 hours of sleep?; The...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/11/03

#222At this point, most people have heard the accepted wisdom that you need 8 hours sleep every night, especially for a healthy brain. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? If you lie awake at night worrying about getting enough sleep, you may be in luck. A reminder that correlation is not causation, and some surprising new research into how our brains respond to lower amounts of sleep.In space news, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has just completed a fly-by of a ‘nearby’ asteroid, in preparation for a much

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29:48

CultureLab: Suzie Edge’s curious (and sometimes...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/31

Did you know we have King Louis XIV to thank for fistula surgeries? After surgeons worked hard to find a cure for his rear-end ailment, the operation became the height of fashion, with people queuing up to go under the knife so they could be just like their king.That’s just one of the incredible stories from Suzie Edge’s new book Vital Organs: A History of the World’s Most Famous Body Parts. Suzie Edge is a medical historian and frequently takes to TikTok to surprise (and sometimes shock) her

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28:44

Weekly: Security risks of ChatGPT; do other mammals...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/27

#221Independent researchers have found new ways that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool can assist bad actors, from providing the code needed to hack computer databases to teaching people how to make homemade explosives. While the company continually updates security safeguards, it turns out some languages can be used to bypass these guardrails.It has long been thought that only humans and some toothed whales go through the menopause. But are there other mammals out there who experience it too? And if so, is it

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24:40

Dead Planets Society: #8 The Worst of All Worlds

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/23

Whether it’s searing heat, sapphire winds striking the sky like rain, or an atmosphere that makes your eyes pop out of your head, some planets are just horrible for life. But even though some pretty horrific planets already exist, the team is not satisfied – they want to bring all of these calamitous qualities together to design the worst of all worlds.In a special bonus edition of Dead Planets Society, recorded on stage in front of an audience at New Scientist Live, Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane

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28:46

Weekly: Communicating with sleeping people; Massive...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/20

#220When you’re asleep, you’re completely dead to the world, right? Well, it turns out we can actually communicate with people while they’re sleeping and even get them to smile or frown on command – at least some of the time., Why this window into the sleeping brain could have important implications for treating people with certain sleep-related health conditions, or even better insights into why and how we dream.In space, scientists have discovered the source of the largest ever recorded marsquake,

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32:55

CultureLab: Free will doesn’t exist? Robert...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/17

Would you feel uneasy or relieved to know that free will doesn’t exist? For those who have been fortunate in life, it may feel an attack to suggest they are not captains of their own ships - that their success was down to biological and environmental chance. But for others it may feel a lot more liberating.Robert Sapolsky is an author, eminent neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University, known by many for his work studying baboons and human biology. But his latest book is much more

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30:40

Weekly: Most detailed map ever of the human brain;...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/13

#219The most detailed map yet of the human brain has been unveiled. The human brain atlas visualises the brain more precisely than we’ve ever been able to before. Cell by cell the map can illuminate how the brain is as specialised and organised as it is and how it develops throughout our lifetimes. How has this been achieved and what can we do with this new level of detail?Two distant icy planets have smashed into each other, turning them into a doughnut of vaporised rock orbiting their nearest

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21:16

Dead Planets Society: #7 Halve the Moon

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/10

Leah finally takes on her arch-nemesis; the two-faced, arrogant, cold-hearted… moon. And despite her lunar love, Chelsea gets roped into the destruction. Together, they plot to crack it like an egg, vaporise it into nothingness and drill into it with a giant jackhammer… all while dodging the space police.Our space marauders recruit the assistance of astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Haym Benaroya at Rutgers University.Dead Planets Society is a

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34:48

Weekly: Big Nobels for tiny science; how Earth might...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/06

#218The 2023 Nobel Prize winners have been announced. Winners of the science prizes include two scientists who helped develop mRNA vaccines, physicists who’ve managed to generate ultra-short pulses of light to study electrons and chemists who’ve made unimaginably tiny crystals, called quantum dots. Why all these discoveries have touched our lives – and how one almost didn’t happen.We’ve got some science-based puzzles that’ll have you scratching your head… Rob Eastaway, the man behind New Scientist’s

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26:09

CultureLab: Surviving the climate crisis – Michael...

The World, the Universe and Us ·

2023/10/02

Our planet has gone through a lot. If we peer into the deep history of Earth’s climate, we see ice ages, rapid warming events and mass extinctions. All of which led to the advent of humankind. But as today’s climate warms at a pace we’ve never seen before, can these past climate events tell us anything about our future?University of Pennsylvania climate scientist and activist Michael Mann explores this in his new book Our Fragile Moment, which looks at how climate change has shaped our planet and

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