Subscribe now

Podcasts

Podcasts for the insatiably curious by the world’s most popular weekly science magazine. Everything from the latest science and technology news to the big-picture questions about life, the universe and what it means to be human.

New Scientist Weekly is our flagship show where we discuss the week’s biggest breakthroughs with our internationally recognised team of journalists. Hosted from our New York bureau by Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor. New episodes every Friday.

Dead Planets Society Join Leah Crane, Chelsea Whyte, and some of the world's foremost experts as they discuss outlandish and mind-blowing what-ifs about the universe. What if Earth was actually cube shaped? Can we destroy the sun? Is it possible to make Pluto a planet again? Currently between seasons. New episodes in 2024.

CultureLab is an array of delights from pop culture. Sometimes we interview the world’s most exciting authors about their fascinating books, other times we delve into the science behind a movie or TV show or just why we love it so much. New episodes every other Tuesday.

How do you destroy a black hole? Turns out they're pretty tough cookies.

Kicking off a brand new series of Dead Planets Society, Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane take on the universe's most powerful adversaries. With the help of their cosmic toolbelt and black hole astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick at the University of Kansas, they test all the destructive ideas they can think of.

Whether it’s throwing masses of TNT at it, blasting it with a t-shirt gun full of white holes, loading it up with a multiverse worth of matter, or sending it back in time – they try everything to kill a black hole. Will they succeed?

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…

Latest podcast episodes

Colab episodes

Sign up to our weekly newsletter

Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox! We'll also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers.

Sign up