Very few places on our planet appear untouchedby humans, but in those that do, nature is still very much in charge – and the scenery is breathtaking. In the new BBC series Wilderness with Simon Reeve, journalist Simone Reeve takes us into the heart of Earth's last great wild areas, including the Congo Basin rainforest, Patagonia, the Coral Triangle and the Kalahari desert in Southern Africa.In this episode of CultureLab, TV columnist Bethan Ackerley asks Simon about the series and his many exciting expeditions, including meeting bonobos in the depths of the Congo and a “staggering experience” trekking up the South Patagonia icefield. We hear about his meetings with Indigenous peoples and what they can teach us about living more intune with nature. And we discover why now is the time to focus on Earth’s wildernesses.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch not only took part in the first ever all-female spacewalks, but she also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, after spending 328 days on board the International Space Station.So what does it take to live in space for such a long time, what does it mean to be a record-breaking astronaut – and how do you get used to gravity again when you finally come back home? New Scientist space reporter Leah Crane asks Chrstina all of these questions and more in a special interview for CultureLab. Plus: the surprising sport of human bowling, what things smell like when you leave planet Earth and how Christina’s sights are now set on the Moon as she prepares for the Artemis 2 mission.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you looking forward to catching up on some reading over the holiday season? Or perhaps you are on the prowl for book recommendations after receiving a few literary gift cards? If so, you are in luck – this episode is all about the books we think you’ll love to read.In this episode of CultureLab, culture and comment editor Alison Flood appears in her role as professional bookworm to share some of her favorite reads of the year. From a sobering story of life in the human-polluted ocean (narrated by a dolphin) to science fiction that takes you to parallel worlds, to the real story of the world’s longest study of happiness. The full list of Alison’s recommendations (and a few from host Christie Taylor) is below. Non-fictionThe Good Life: lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness by Robert Waldinger and Marc SchulzBeing Human: How our biology shaped world history by Lewis DartnellOf Time and Turtles: Mending the world, shell by shattered shell by Sy MontgomeryThe Power of Trees: How ancient forests can save us if we let them by Peter WohllebenEnchantment: Reawakening wonder in an exhausted age by Katherine MayElderflora: A modern history of ancient trees by Jared FarmerThe Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship with the cosmos by Jaime GreenBreathe: Tackling the climate emergency by Sadiq KhanWasteland: The dirty truth about what we throw away, where it goes, and why it matters by Oliver Franklin-WallisFire Weather: A true story from a hotter world by John VaillantFictionIn Ascension by Martin McInnesThe Ferryman by Justin CroninBridge by Lauren BeukesThe Future by Naomi AldermanStarter Villain by John ScalziPod by Laline Paull Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Composer Erland Cooper is known for playful, innovative, experimental projects. For example, he buried the only audio copy of a 2021 composition – then left treasure hunt clues for people to try to find it. Which one couple, eventually, did.In this episode of CultureLab, Cooper talks to writer Arwa Haider about his newest album, Folded Landscapes, where he is deep in conversation with the environment and our changing climate. The movements of the piece were recorded with the Scottish Ensemble chamber orchestra, in both sub-zero temperatures and a sweltering studio. He then exposed the audio master tape to the sun on the UK’s hottest day in history, in July of last year. Cooper describes encasing recording equipment in ice, recreating the acoustics of glacial caves in Norway’s Svalbard, and why he prefers a slower kind of activism in the name of celebrating and cherishing the natural world and encouraging change. Read Arwa Haider’s full piece about Cooper’s work.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Australian outback is vast and the population is really spread out. This makes getting access to emergency healthcare incredibly challenging, as you may be a thousand kilometres or more from the nearest major hospital. The solution? Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service – one of the largest aeromedical organisations in the world, and, at nearly 100 years old, the first of its kind.In this bonus episode of the podcast, Australia reporter Alice Klein speaks to two RFDS team members about some of their incredible rescue operations, from saving a man who crashed his motorbike into an emu, to rescuing a child with a broken femur. She also hears the gut-wrenching tale of Michelle, who says she owes her life to the RFDS.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 followers with the true health stories of famous people from the past.In this episode, Suzie explores some of the most fascinating tales from her book, including the tale of Alexis St. Martin, who became a medical curiosity after an accident left his stomach partially open to the world. She explains why she loves talking about the bodies of famous people from the past – how it makes them feel less like myths or legends, and more like real people. And she touches on our obsession with stigmatising people based on their physical appearance – how movie villains often have facial disfigurements, or how historians often blamed Kaiser Wilhelm’s warlike ways on his disabled left arm.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 associated with the field of philosophy. Determined: Life Without Free Will explores the notions of choice, responsibility and morality, arguing that free will does not exist and why acknowledging this should cause us to rethink the fundamentals of human society.In this episode of CultureLab, Timothy Revell asks Sapolsky why humans are so-hardwired to believe that free will does exist, how our understanding of free will has shifted over the years and whether we could avoid societal collapse if everyone began believing their actions are not their own.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt. The 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. Or if you just want to chat about this episode or wrecking the cosmos more generally, tweet @chelswhyte and @downhereonearth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 human societies for better and for worse. The big take home message is that it’s not too late to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.In this episode of CultureLab, environment reporter James Dinneen speaks to Mann about the climate extremes we’ve seen this year, what we can learn from ancient rapid warming events like the P.E.T.M (Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum) and why climate doom is now a bigger threat than denial to taking action.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You’re in the volcano lair of an evil supervillain, hellbent on taking over the world. In anger, he hurls one of his minions into the molten lava bubbling beneath them, as the unfortunate lacky swiftly sinks into the river of molten rock. If you’ve ever watched a James Bond-esque film, you’ll be able to picture the scene. The problem is - the science doesn’t stack up.John Scalzi is an American science fiction author, and in his new book ‘Starter Villain’ he injects a dose of realism into many classic tropes about villains, humorously poking holes in some of the flaws of logic we see on TV - including their penchant for volcano lairs. They’re still useful, just maybe not in the way you’d think. The novel follows the journey of Charlie, who is unwittingly thrust into the dangerous world of supervillains, forced to take up his late uncle’s mantle.In this episode of CultureLab, Christie Taylor asks Scalzi what an evil mastermind would actually look like in the real world, why the genetically engineered dolphins in his book are such jerks and how he gets away with leaving some of the science unexplained.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether it’s the hidden colours of ultraviolet that bees can see, the complex rhythms and tones of birdsong that we’re unable to hear, or the way a dog can smell the past in incredible detail, the way humans experience the world is not the only way.Every animal has its own ‘umwelt’ – a unique sensory experience that allows it to perceive the world differently. As humans we can barely begin to understand what the world looks like to many of the other creatures that inhabit the Earth. But author Ed Yong is helping to paint a picture…In this episode of CultureLab, Christie Taylor speaks to Ed about the paperback release of his book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which looks at more than 100 different species and explores the amazing ways their sensory worlds are shaped by light, sound, vibrations, heat and even electrical charge.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Struggling to choose what to watch? Whether it’s sci-fi, medical dramas or documentaries about the natural world, we’ve got you covered. Our TV columnist Bethan Ackerley shares a rundown of her top TV choices from 2023 so far, as well as what to look out for the rest of the year. Reviews of some of the shows featured in this episode:  Foundation (Apple TV)The Last Of Us (HBO Max and Sky Atlantic)Best Interests (Sky Go, Amazon, Apple TV)Wild Isles (BBC iPlayer, Amazon)Dead Ringers (Amazon)Silo (Apple TV)To read all of Bethan’s TV columns visit newscientist.com/author/bethan-ackerley Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scientist and broadcaster Alice Roberts has written her first children’s book. The fictional tale follows prehistoric girl Tuuli, and captures the story of her encounter with a strange boy who leads her on a great adventure.Inspired by her own experiences trekking through the arctic, the book imagines what life would’ve been like for humans of the time, how they might’ve interacted with neanderthals and grapples with questions like: how were the first wolves domesticated?In this episode of CultureLab, New Scientist’s comment and culture editor Alison Flood, and her 10-year-old daughter Jenny, ask Alice about the inspiration for the book and the science behind it.To read about subjects like this and much more, visit newscientist.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.