New Scientist Podcasts

#227Quantum computing researchers at IBM have stepped up the power of their devices by a huge amount. The company’s new device Condor has more than doubled the number of quantum bits of its previous record-breaking machine, which was released just last year. This massive increase in computational power is just one of the company’s latest achievements. It has also announced Heron, a smaller quantum computer but one that’s less error-prone – and therefore more useful – than any IBM has made.We’ve seen a lot of big wins at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, but many of them have come with caveats. From exciting commitments on loss and damage negotiations to the 120 countries that have pledged to triple their renewable energy by the end of this decade, the latest agreements bring a lot of promise. But as funding targets fall short, the world’s highest emitters sit out on certain pledges and people with financial stakes in fossil fuels negotiate pledges of their own, the summit’s success remains in flux.An antibody treatment may protect people from overdosing on the dangerous opioid drug fentanyl, even as the opioid epidemic kills more than 150 people each day in the United States. Although this treatment has not yet been tested in humans, a single infusion protects monkeys from overdose for a month. Why this new approach is so promising and could even treat addiction to the drug.Honeyguides are a type of bird that guide humans to bees' nests by responding to specific calls made by people hunting honey. It's a remarkable example of partnership between species: this cooperation means the humans get honey and the birds get a tasty snack of wax and bee larvae. Even more amazing is the finding that honeyguides respond to different calls depending on where they are in the world.Plus: A new species of hedgehog has been discovered, how self-replicating nanorobots could be used to make drugs or chemicals inside our bodies and which brain regions are involved in understanding (and enjoying) jokes.Hosts Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor discuss with guests Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, Jacob Aron, Grace Wade and Sam Wong. To read more about these stories, visit newscientist.com.

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 best-seller “Science and Cooking: Physics meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine”.In this episode of CultureLab, Pia explains how understanding chemistry and biology can help us to make the perfect cheese sauce, offers up a masterclass in fermentation and teaches us what insects have to do with why your avocado goes brown – and why acids can stop the process. She also describes how to make Lutfisk, Sweden’s gelatinous answer to ceviche, an admittedly ‘acquired taste’ of a dish.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com.

#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 meeting.You may want to thank dirt for the evolution of life on Earth and the incredible biodiversity on the planet. We now know from computer simulations that a spike in nutrient-rich soil led to a boom in marine biodiversity millions of years ago. And thanks to plate tectonics and continental drift, that soil built up on land too and was an essential ingredient to life as we know it.What would happen to our solar system if the Sun suddenly had some competition…like if a roaming star flew too close? Would it snatch one of our planets, disrupt their orbits or send Mercury hurling towards the Sun? As researchers have found out, these and many other frightening scenarios are all possible - but thankfully not that likely. Bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields with tiny pits in their skin and could be using them to hunt or even navigate. This new finding puts them on par with sharks, who also have this superpower. Plus: How chinstrap penguins sleep 11 hours a day, but in thousands of 4-second micro-naps. AI predicts there could be more than 2 million different ways to make a crystal. And how to pour a cup of tea as quietly as possible.Hosts Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor discuss with guests James Dinneen, Jacob Aron, Leah Crane and Chen Ly. To read more about these stories, visit newscientist.com.

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 and recreational use become more popular and increasingly accessible, how exactly did we get to this moment of change? What has research been able to tell us – so far – about how the plant produces its euphoric effects, what medical purposes it may be able to serve or how it might be harmful? And how could our relationship with this unassuming leaf change in the coming decades?In the first of this three-part special series on the science of cannabis, Christie Taylor explores our deep history with cannabis, from the first domestication 12,000 years ago in Northwest China, to the current skyrocketing popularity in the United States and around the world.Learn more: The team at New Scientist investigates cannabis and the brain, the environmental cost of growing cannabis, and other questions in this special reporting series. Visit newscientist.com/cannabis

#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 when it’s time to eat. A mice study found AgRP brain cells fire faster right around the time the rodents usually chow down. If this is true in humans too, it may clue us into our own hunger cues.Earth has been hit by a powerful cosmic ray, the second most powerful ever detected. This tiny subatomic particle contains a massive amount of energy and is thought to have come from a place in space called the cosmic void. How it got here is a mystery and has scientists excitedly searching for an answer.Babies are learning how to speak before they’re even born. While we know babies come to know the sound of their parents’ voices while in the womb, it turns out just hearing people talk enhances their future language skills and ability to recognise specific languages.Plus: Why one bat in Europe uses its penis as a hand, how a robot is being trained to pick up your dirty washing and why plants in Europe are more productive on the weekend.Hosts Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor discuss with guests Leah Crane, Clare Wilson, Alex Wilkins and Chen Ly. To read more about these stories, visit newscientist.com.Event:Separating the science from the hype with the latest research on cannabis.

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 re-formed planet would spur on the evolution of some pretty strange lifeforms, including sea monsters.Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt to destroying the sun – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at deadplanets@newscientist.com. It may just feature in a later episode… And if you just want to chat about this episode or wrecking the cosmos more generally, tweet @chelswhyte and @downhereonearth. 

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 portions of the planet would be habitable, why we would need giant fish bowls on wheels to cross from one face to the other and why earthquakes would become the new normal.Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt to destroying the sun – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at deadplanets@newscientist.com. It may just feature in a later episode… And if you just want to chat about this episode or wrecking the cosmos more generally, tweet @chelswhyte and @downhereonearth.

#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 “death gap” between men and women increasing dramatically in recent years. Why are men now dying nearly six years before women on average? Covid-19, opioid use, suicide and firearms are all influencing the worrisome trend.Bonobos are the peacekeepers of the primate world. While their close cousins, chimpanzees, prefer to fight with rival groups to resolve conflict, bonobos prefer to have sex – and they generally get along with members of other groups. Why some bonobos are friendlier than others, and what that might tell us about human aggression and cooperation.Physicists have created tiny lasers from soap bubbles. This whimsical sounding technological feat is surprisingly simple to recreate. With a few ingredients, you too could create a bubble laser at home. Useful for detecting electric fields and pressure changes, this could become a much more affordable way of producing sensors in the future.Plus: How 20 per cent of people who take Paxlovid, a covid-19 drug that reduces the risk of severe illness, rebound and get the virus again a few days after they stop taking it; how to seed new life on a planet by “catching” a comet; and how one artificial intelligence model has learned how to beat us at both chess and poker, and what this might say about creating more “generally” intelligent AIs.Hosts Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor discuss all of this with guests James Dinneen, Corryn Wetzel, Sam Wong and Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. To read more about these stories, visit newscientist.com.Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123; US 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988; hotlines in other countries.Event: Separating the science from the hype with the latest research on cannabis.

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 human body. But author Samantha Harvey says she hopes Orbital is as much a painting as it is a novel, writing in expressive prose to capture the epic vistas witnessed from space each day. From glaciers and deserts, to the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans – and even the destructive force of an intensifying typhoon. In this episode, Rowan Hooper asks Harvey about her inspirations and how she was able to so vividly capture this sense of Earth from afar. Plus a meditation on what it means, emotionally, to look at our planet from space and reckon with how we are changing it. To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com.