Liz Else, Author at ��è��Ƶ

The best new popular science books of July 2026

Liz Else — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:00:55 +0000

Australia’s tiger quoll – as featured in Dan Werb’s Our Wild Familiars, out this month

Shutterstock/Craig Dingle

It’s a hot month in London – in oh so many ways. Life, being alive and death are big themes in the new popular science books out in July, not to mention that small thing of being a human and all the messy feelings and sensory stuff that goes with it. Then there’s also AI filling the future ��– in ways that worry one of the world’s leading forensic scientists, as well as ethicists who are paid to think about this sort of thing. I’m looking forward to delving into the worlds of volcanoes and pharmacology, which look positively safe and stable in comparison…

by Valerie Tiberius

Can friendship with a chatbot ever be as good as friendship with a gang of flesh-and-blood besties? Is there still and will there – can there�� – always be something about human friendships that will elude the smartest of simulations? Ethicist and University of Minnesota professor of philosophy Valerie Tiberius sets out to argue the human case. She defines the ideal friendship as an enjoyable, close relationship built on shared activities between people who care about each other for their own sake. It will be interesting to see where her book goes with this – especially since Shannon Vallor, author of��The AI Mirror: How to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking, thinks it “provides a nuanced philosophical survey of the possibilities for human-AI relationships by highlighting their considerable risks and benefits”.

The first six months of the year have brought us popular science reads on everything from consciousness to cosmology. Liz Else rounds up her favourites

by Richard Coker

It may sound a bit gloomy, but Timor Mortis (literally “fear of death”) could hardly be more timely as we increasingly worry about the quality of end-of-life care for everyone we care about (including ourselves). Then there’s what we mean by “a good death” – and perhaps the biggest question of all, how do we live in the hyperteched 21st century in the visceral shadow of our own death? Public health doctor Richard Coker probes death’s complexities from different perspectives: biological, psychological, moral and historical. Coker has certainly done the rounds, latterly as a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and earlier as a doctor working with people who had TB or HIV/AIDS.

by Tamie Jovanelly

This is one of the latest in the redoubtable What Everyone Needs to Know series from Oxford University Press, covering everything from gender to robots. And how could you go wrong with the subject of volcanoes? Geology professor Tamie Jovanelly has over 20 years of global research experience in volcanism, climate change, water systems and natural hazards to guide her as she answers those simple questions we might be too embarrassed to ask anyone else. Where do we find volcanoes? Can we predict when and where they will erupt? Can we harness their energy? ��With 1350 active volcanoes on Earth, between 50 and 70 erupting annually, not to mention climate change in the mix, explaining what makes one of nature’s most powerful forces work isn’t a simple task. Jovanelly also gives us GPS coordinates for locating volcanoes, high-definition photographs for identifying volcanic minerals and rocks – and there’s an appendix featuring 100 of the world’s most active volcanoes.

by Rod Flower

This book sounds like it might be a great companion to a title we featured in May: Nick Barber’s How to Take Drugs: A new approach to medication for better results and fewer side effects. And given the staggering 1 billion-plus prescriptions written in the UK every year – and, even more staggeringly, over five billion in the US – members of the prescribed-to public can stand all the help they can get to understand why they take the drugs they do, and what those drugs do. This is more of a history and context-builder, as Rod Flower, emeritus professor of biochemical pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London (with a big interest in inflammation and anti-inflammatories) takes us through the astonishingly fast evolution of our drug use, from healing plants and herbs to a global market just under $2 trillion – and the rise of pharmacology as a discipline. Flower also shows us how drugs really work in detail, the process of medicine development and what makes scientists think that their therapies will work as, er, advertised.

A clay counting board from Uruk, Iraq, dated to the fourth millennium BC. Data as power is explored in Roopika Risam’s new book, out this month

Osama SM Amin FRCP(Glasg)

by Roopika Risam

“Groundbreaking and provocative” is how its publishers describe Data Empire. This exploration of data as power tracks back millennia to the first clay tablets of Mesopotamia, through knotted strings keeping account to the algorithmic modern state. Their purpose sounds oddly familiar: helping states govern people/empires, and helping institutions to decide who appears on the official record and who doesn’t. As we stare, often helplessly, at the plethora of hyperconnected, pervasive, personally extractive tech heading at us, shaping the future needs the insights of people like Risam, working from her multiple perspectives, including a digital humanities and social engagement professorship at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Any writer would be thrilled to have the kind of applause she has attracted, with Lewis Dartnell (author of The Knowledge: How to rebuild our world from scratch) calling the book “Breathtaking in its scope” and one of the founders of VR, Jaron Lanier, describing it as the “new history of mankind demanded by our times… This book asks what we will do about data now that we have no choice but to do something.”

by Ian Bogost

In a time of excess consumption, enforced efficiency and fear of missing out, it sounds distinctly quixotic to be pursuing a more gratifying life. But Atlantic columnist and computer academic/designer Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff is pitched as just that. From digital tickets to automated taps, say its publishers, life’s simple pleasures have been stripped away, replaced by sleek, soulless design. Bogost “uncovers how modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments that keep us grounded and human”. So it isn’t just a matter of smelling the roses, and sitting under more trees, but reinvesting in your interactions with the material world and more labour-creating devices. Small pleasures instead of flat giant screens… can’t wait!

by Dan Werb

Brown rats, raccoons, and urban foxes; house flies and cockroaches; even dandelions and kudzu vines; they are wild creatures living alongside humans, hence the lovely Greek noun that describes them: synanthrope (syn meaning “with”; anthropos “man”). These and more exotic creatures, such as the tiger quoll or the collared delma, are at the heart of what looks like a really fascinating book. Writer and epidemiologist Dan Werb goes beyond examining the everyday roles these wild animals play in our lives: from annoyance at the activities of houseflies and urban foxes, to replacing lids in raccoon country or watching out for disease vectors from brown rats and others. He’s also interested in how we are reaching a key moment as these creatures are “arbiters of our planet’s future”, and “a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species”. Environmental destruction means that their urban habitats will increase and their numbers soar. We are going to have to stop resisting them and learn how to live in harmony. By the way, the collared delma is a tiny legless lizard, but the tiger quoll is a metre-long carnivore – a cross between a cat and a rat. Interesting futures ahead then.

Forensic anthropologist Sue Black has a new book out this month

Peter Jolly/Shutterstock

��by Sue Black

This is the third book in a trilogy by Sue Black, one of the UK’s most eminent forensic scientists with 40 years of experience working on the evidence used in criminal cases. This time she’s putting science in the dock as she uses landmark cases to unpick what went wrong, where justice was served, what we should fight to preserve – and asks how AI and other forms of automation will work in court. And while there have been huge leaps forward – the discovery of DNA fingerprinting, and Black’s own vein-pattern identification work – cases like that of Andrew Malkinson, wrongly convicted and jailed for 17 years, show what happens when things go wrong. She asks if we’ll be able to cope with the future coming at us fast. “Are we prepared for AI to redact police files before they are sent to the CPS? Are we ready to accept instant interview translations? If they are incorrect, who will correct them? Who will notice? We will certainly all care,” she writes. We will indeed.

��è��Ƶ recommends an unsettling deep dive into forensic science

Esteemed forensic anthropologist Sue Black gives a candid insight into the UK criminal justice system and how it really works in her book An Expert Witness, finds Linda Geddes

by Eleanor Drage

Confusion and fear around the fast encroachment of AI and where it may lead is completely understandable. But ethicist Eleanor Drage is exploring, as her book’s subtitle puts it, “How to stop catastrophising and build an ethical future”. She reckons we need a whole new language and some fresh ideas to determine what AI is and how we should use it. That translates into adding feminism, reparative justice and climate politics into the debate. Early endorsements include broadcaster Sandi Toksvig (“A wise and purpose-driven book to steer us out of AI doom”) and N. Katherine Hayles, author of From Bacteria to AI (“Eleanor Drage dismantles prophecies of both apocalypse and transcendence to show how we can achieve liveable futures with AI”).

The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book

by Melanie Challenger

This is one of our biggest conceptual problems: what does it mean to be alive? Researcher and natural philosopher Melanie Challengerprobes the latest discoveries in biology and physics “to reveal a radical truth: to be alive is first and foremost a way of being a body”, say the book’s publicists. This sounds great and it will be interesting to see how the argument plays out – how far Alive lives up the claims and restores “agency, purpose and meaning to organisms in an age of artificial intelligence and biodiversity loss”.

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The 17 best popular science books of 2026 so far

Liz Else — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:00:00 +0000

The first six months of the year have brought us popular science reads on everything from consciousness to cosmology. Liz Else rounds up her favourites

The best new popular science books of June 2026

Liz Else — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:30:52 +0000

Alice Roberts has a new book out in June

David Stock

This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene.

(editor-in-chief Alice Roberts)

It’s quite hard going to get an up-to-date grip on human evolution, even for the best-briefed adult, so a book with sophisticated text and excellent illustrations and diagrams can only be a good thing. Especially if it is curated and edited by Alice Roberts, biological anthropologist, palaeopathologist, broadcaster – and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. She worked with a generous-sized international team of experts in many fields of human evolution, including archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology and cognitive science. Each chapter is devoted to the evolution of a part of the body, including hands, lungs and the digestive system, building a complex picture of our origins and nature. There are so many questions to address: when did we invent clothes? Why are our babies altricial (underdeveloped and highly dependent at birth)? What happened to the other modern humans? Are we the only animals to have become quite so self-aware? Just the kind of book to take on a very long trip.

�� by Saira Hameed

For Saira Hameed, we are all hormonal, all of the time – it’s not colloquial shorthand for feeling tired, moody, puffy or all three. But then, as a consultant endocrinologist, she knows that the tiny hypothalamus (“an implausible leader of the body’s hormones”, as she calls it) controls the myriad processes that are all about everyday life and that we barely notice when they work: appetite, body weight, thirst, stress, sleep, growth, metabolism, puberty, reproduction and sex drive. This all makes for a fascinating book built around her clinical practice, featuring patients whose lives have been interrupted by the faulty signalling of any of the 50-plus hormones that run the human show. A sneak peek reveals a young boy whose life has been shattered by a brain tumour too stuck onto the hypothalamus for a clean excision. His sleep is erratic, his weight is soaring and it’s going to take more operations and tweaking hormones to approach giving him a life that works. And there are stories of terrible exhaustion and crushing infertility. It looks to be compelling stuff – and she sounds like the kind of consultant you would want on your side.

��è��Ƶ recommends Togetherness, a radical new view of life

An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet

by Rowan Hooper

Rowan Hooper is ��è��Ƶ’s pod meister and a senior editor here for many years. His third book sets out to change all our minds, and to replace the dangerous shallows of competition that have brought us to the brink with a knowledge and sense of the small miracles of cooperation that have forged our natural world. The ubiquitous, lifelong partnerships between animals and plants, insects and fungi, fish and bacteria are an essential guide for a better future. Togetherness reveals the intimate connectedness of nature through stories of symbiosis. From the female wasp venturing deep inside a fig, and the intricate relationship between corals and the algae that sustain them, to the symbiotic gut microbes that influence our moods, Hooper explores how cooperation is fundamental to life and to protecting our shared future. The hope, the plan, is to change how we see the world, our place in it – and our obligation to it, so we can forge a symbiotic future. We can build nothing less than a symbiocene.

by Darby Saxbe

Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California who has conducted one of the world’s largest longitudinal studies on men’s brains as they become fathers. She should be in a great place “to shift the narrative by showing that great parents are made, not born” and to answer the question that some might consider it premature to celebrate fathers when our culture still does so little to support mothers. “I’d answer that parenthood is not a zero-sum game… Understanding the influence of fathers helps us build the tag team of adults who are cray about their kids. That, I hope, is a cause we can all champion,” she writes. It looks like a book for a deep read and a terrific addition to the increasing number of fatherhood books, like the excellent 2024 Father Time by anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao

What could be more fun than a counter-intuitive climate book? Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behaviour scientist Jiaying Zhao (both at the University of British Columbia, Canada) assembled a pile of what sound like too-good-to-be-true propositions. Take this: can you improve your happiness and wellbeing while also reducing your carbon footprint? Or, what if the most effective ways to fight climate change made you happy?��And suppose we could make ourselves, and our planet, happier at the same time? Dunn and Zhao have a point: if you like��the changes you make, you’re more likely to stick with them – and spread them across friend and family networks. So, you don’t have to become a vegan or give up flying:��sub chicken for beef, and take carry-on bags. Both make a decent dent in emissions at a lower personal cost. They also urge us to approach your emissions the way you (ideally) do your finances: strategically, thoughtfully and with the long-term firmly in mind. But above all, do something and do it joyfully. And more good news, data scientist Hannah Ritchie (author of Not the End of the World, a book stuffed with climate facts and hopeful solutions) approves. “Many would argue that this is too good to be true; Dunn and Zhao expertly show us that it is not,” she writes of the book.

Leroy Chiao gives an insight into life as an astronaut in a new book

by Leroy Chiao with Victoria Bruce

What would you ask an astronaut if you could have lunch with them? Few people know how interstellar exploration feels better than Leroy Chiao, a retired NASA astronaut, former International Space Station commander and veteran of four space missions. He most recently served as commander and NASA science officer of Expedition 10 aboard the International Space Station (spending 229 days in space). Chiao is one of the first Asian-American astronauts, and, say his publishers, using his “unique perspective from flying with fellow American, Japanese and Russian professionals”, he can answer burning questions such as: what is the new space race, and who are the next generation of competitors? What is NASA working on these days? What feelings did you experience looking out at Earth from space? What does the future of space exploration look like? Will we ever make it to Mars? So, what would you ask over a three-course dinner?

by Brian Clegg

Could you accurately describe an electron, its function, genesis, discovery or future? If not, then enter Brian Clegg, with what looks like a handy refresher in the shape of a biography. Expect to hear everything from when the term was originally coined as a tentative name for the basic unit of electrical charge to the electron’s increasing centrality to our lives through electricity. Roger Highfield,��science director of The Science Museum, UK, reckons that in “34 brisk, brilliantly crafted chapters, he sweeps through centuries of discovery: essential reading for our electrified age”.

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Kojo Koram

As “the 20th-century distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drugs blur into incoherence”, The Next Fix by law professor and investigative journalist Kojo Koram is billed by one of its early reviewers as a guide to the new territory in which “yesterday’s banned substances are today’s wellness aids or pharmaceutical miracles”. Tricky territory indeed. Especially as it’s a bit of a no-brainer that the so-called War on Drugs will only be replaced by an approach based on the same old monopolies and exploitation that caused so many problems in the first place – from poverty to deforestation, pollution and loss of biodiversity. Koram tracks the tensions along a newly legalised frontier, exploring the possibilities of drug reform versus a new chapter in capitalism creating “a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies”.

��by Jessica Pykett

Data from facial emotion recognition, brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality, global emotion surveys and sentiment analysis seem to offer an extraordinary new terrain for scientific exploration. Emotion-sensing promises to decode and even to augment and control the very essence of human experience. But what if the science and technology of emotion measurement get emotions wrong? ��In��Governing Global Emotions, Jessica Pykett, professor of social and political geography and codirector of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing at the University of Birmingham, UK, describes how technologies create emotional data, how smart cities use sensors to monitor residents’ feelings and how global economies measure happiness. In an age of ever-increasing surveillance capitalism and the rise of neurocapitalism, that should make for an interesting read.

by Janet L. Jones

How much do we know about the psychology and neurology of one our companion animals, the charismatic horse? Somehow, say the publishers of A Horse’s World by Janet L. Jones, horses have been largely ignored by cognitive science even though the bond between horse and rider is every bit as strong as any other cross-species relationship. Neuroscientist and horse trainer Jones is up for producing an equine version of An Immense World��or Soul of an Octopus, through her own relationship with a horse called True North. Her account claims to be the first book of its kind to explore the fascinating science of how horses think, feel, learn and connect with their human companions, as Jones exposes common misconceptions that cause us to fault horses for “misbehaviours” that are normal prey-brain responses. She also explains, among many other features, how horses trade a human-style prefrontal cortex – capable of judgment, manipulation and complex strategic thinking – for powerful memory that supports excellent intelligence. Given the first MRI scan of an equine brain was not completed until 2019, there is still a vast deal to learn about equine neurology and neural physiology – and how to build trust with a creature whose internal world differs from our own.

Louis Lefebre’s new book delves into the cognitive capacity of birds, like this grey crow

Aleksandr Lazarenko/Shutterstock

by Louis Lefebvre, translated by Pablo Strauss

Just in case there are any lingering doubts about the cognitive capacity of birds, biologist and avian researcher Louis Lefebvre looks sure to dispel them in this book, which sets out to reveal how birds exhibit creativity, social learning and even cultural transmission, delving into the behaviours of everything from crows using cars as nutcrackers to cockatoos crafting tools. Blending decades of scientific research with anecdotes, Lefebvre derives an “innovation quotient” (like a human IQ) to measure and rank the innovation of a particular species. He answers questions about how a bird species spreads a new technique, why research on bird cognition is being used to train AI models and robots and what makes certain birds endlessly innovative, while others stubbornly repeat the same behaviours. Nicky Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, has described the book as “an amazing avian adventure… Like a profound magic effect, there are hidden gems on every page, tailored to both the general public and the in-depth expert.”

by Beeban Kidron

What has Bridget Jones got to do with moves to fight back against the excesses of big tech? The two are united in the person of author Baroness Beeban Kidron, now a crossbench peer and campaigner in the UK’s second house, the House of Lords – and once a film director (Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason). Her book Users is being promoted as an insider’s guide to how politicians and policymakers have sold democracy to Silicon Valley, and what we need to do to take it back. Kidron takes us on a journey from the halls of Parliament and the UN to the White House and Silicon Valley. Through her encounters with specialist police officers, bereaved parents, lobbyists and tech bros, says the publisher, we witness the unchecked power of Big Tech, as they avoid rules and regulations, and capture governments that are meant to protect us. We see how the issue is not technology itself, but its use and abuse. How tools built to connect people are redeployed to divide, punish, distract, and control; while tech overlords come to own everything – but continue to be held responsible for nothing. In February, she told The Bookseller: “Users��is my answer to the hundreds of people who have contacted me feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed or simply angry about technology – asking, ‘What can we do?’ My greatest wish is that readers find something in it that inspires them to act – in their homes, communities and workplaces – and to demand more from those in power.”

by Michael Handford

Michael Handford’s story sounds like it will be terrible, powerful and ultimately fascinating – probably in equal measure. He was an academic specialising in intercultural communication when he received a stage 4 throat cancer diagnosis at the age of 42 while living and working in Japan and the UK. According to his publisher, his book “examines how communication – whether with doctors, loved ones, or oneself – can shape the cancer experience”. Hanford even worked on devising his own metaphor for cancer, not caring for the more stereotypical ones involving battles. Now that’s a class act.

The best new popular science books of May 2026

Liz Else — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:00:47 +0000

Google data editor Simon Rogers tells us What We Ask Google in his new book out this month

Mijansk786/Shutterstock

This month’s most exciting popular science books are surprisingly eclectic, and big on invention, ambition –and hubris. We’re tackling topics including the wonder (and envy) of flight, how to eat so the planet doesn’t collapse, the human capacity to build colossal structures and a drugs industry worth trillions, that er, doesn’t work as planned. Get stuck in – there’s plenty to amuse, delight and terrify.

by Simon Rogers

How do I get rid of hiccups? Why is grief so lonely? Should I have a third child?�� How can I help a bee? In What We Ask Google: A surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind, Google data editor Simon Rogers shares some of the intimate, touching, momentous and downright human questions that we’ve been asking Google for over two decades now. There is plenty of opportunity for embarrassed winces reading Rogers’s exploration of the billions of anonymous data searches: we share more than we know, it seems. Rogers is also a lecturer in data journalism at Medill-Northwestern University, San Francisco, and wrote the well-regarded Facts are Sacred in 2013. Oh, and economist Tim Harford (presenter of BBC Radio’s More or Less and an FT columnist) says, “This view from the other side of the search box is both charming and insightful.”

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Courtney Conley and Milica McDowell

Hands up if you haven’t been pushing through the daily tyranny of notching up however many thousands of steps are in vogue that month. Well, you may change your mind after reading Walk: Your life depends on it by gait specialist Courtney Conley and physiotherapist Milica McDowell, which focuses on the multiple health benefits of walking and argues, say the publishers, that “it is one of our most powerful and under-prescribed medicines”. The applications of that medicine span everything from preventing/treating obesity and falls to mitigating lower back pain – so that would be most of us caught up in those preventable conditions at some time in our lives. And, as ancient societies (not to mention Romantic poets like Wordworth and Coleridge) knew all too well, thinking, creating and walking do indeed go well together. Sounds like a win.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

We’re looking forward to the wildest of political rides crashing into epic physics from ��è��Ƶ columnist Chanda Prescod Weinstein in The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, poetry and the cosmic dream boogie. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, brought her many accolades, and this one is already off to a great start with praise from the likes of Ruha Benjamin, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, who described it as a “lyrical exploration of the universe that dances at the intersection of physics, pop culture, and Black intellectual thought”. Then there’s theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who reckons it is a “great read for any human being who lives in the universe”. I can’t wait to get a finished copy and dig deep, not least to discover exactly what the section delivers with its tantalising title, “How to Live Safely in a Science Factual Universe”, where Virginia Hamilton’s short story collection The People Could Fly fits in and why Chanda stayed up late thinking about metaphors in science.

by Vincent Doumeizel (translated by Charlotte Coombe)

Just how much better placed do you need to be to write about plankton? Vincent Doumeizel, author of The Power of Plankton: How plankton made life on Earth possible and why it’s key to our future, is senior adviser on oceans to the U.N. Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility initiative. Publisher The Book Social says his new book uncovers hidden connections between “these microscopic organisms and the survival of our planet”, shares “unforgettable” stories about a scientist who survived 65 days crossing the Atlantic eating only plankton and reveals the truth behind ancient myths of “blood rain”, which apparently traces back to plankton blooms. ��è��Ƶ readers will also remember his previous book, The Seaweed Revolution, which reviewer Chris Simms thought was excellent, as it made the case for the potential of seaweed to transform our world. So where does that leave plankton’s power, then? The clue is in the subtitle – as usual!

The remains of Richard III where they were discovered in 2012

University of Leicester

by Turi King

You may not know the name Turi King, but you will almost certainly have heard of her work: identifying the bones of Richard III in a car park in the UK city of Leicester and leading the project to sequence Adolf Hitler’s genome. So, we can definitely expect amazing stories in her new book, The Secrets of Our DNA: How genetics has changed the world. But underpinning those stories (think everything from O.J. Simpson to mistaken dinosaur DNA to Angelina Jolie’s BRCA1 gene) will be a deep account of how genetics has ended up entangled in the lives of us all. King “shows how we are all interconnected and why we must all benefit from this exciting and rapidly evolving science” and reminds us that DNA need not be destiny – nor is it the silver bullet some imagine.

by Helen Pilcher

Many of us – and that may well include some doctors – still have to get seriously acquainted with the nocebo effect, which can make us feel unwell or even experience pain. Science writer and former cell biologist Helen Pilcher is here to help, with her latest, This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why our minds are making us sick. Like placebo, the word nocebo has Latin roots, but while placebo is linked to someone’s positive expectations, nocebo is linked to negative expectations. In medicine, the placebo effect can mean that a patient expecting a particular treatment to have a good outcome gets that outcome – even when they receive an inert medicine or sugar pill. A nocebo is, sort of, the reverse. But it’s also a lot more complex than that, as we’ve reported in ��è��Ƶ, so it will be fascinating to see what Pilcher makes of it – especially because of the possible implications of social media feeds for mass psychogenic illnesses, or even the controversial phenomenon known as ��Havana syndrome.

April has a lot to offer when it comes to popular science reading, promising to help us do everything from future-proof our brains courtesy of Hannah Critchlow, to get to grips with really big numbers, thanks to Richard Elwes

by Dr Nick Barber

You might well wonder whether Nick Barber decided he had to have the “Dr” in front of his name on this book to keep everyone on the right page here, given its title. How to Take Drugs: A new approach to medication for better results and fewer side effects looks likely to be the kind of book we should all have chained to our wrists, given the sheer amount of prescription medicines we are likely to consume in a lifetime. That, and the fact that adverse drug reactions are a huge burden on health care systems – with the percentage of hospital admissions due to adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescription medicines in the UK alone estimated to be as high as 6 to 7 per cent by some studies, to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Barber is emeritus professor of pharmacy at University College London and recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, so he should know a thing or two about the state of his sector, what the real ADR figures may be – and how to address all the factors involved.

by Dave Goulson

How to eat well without harming the planet is one of the world’s knottiest problems, so it is tempting to welcome any book promising to guide us through the multidimensional issues. But Eat the Planet Well: How to fix our toxic food system – one meal at a time is by Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, who wrote well-received books like The Garden Jungle and A Sting in the Tale, not to mention more than 300 scientific articles on the ecology and conservation of bumblebees and other insects. His publishers say Goulson shows that changing our damaging ways is possible through supporting less-intensive farming, wasting less and rethinking what we eat – that our everyday choices really do matter. I’ll definitely be reading this one.

by Simon Barnes

What child hasn’t wanted to fly like a bird? And many an adult still yearns to soar like an eagle. So, Simon Barnes’s How to Fly: Taking wing with birds, bats, insects and humans sounds like it’s going to be fun. Its publishers say it’s “a unique and all-encompassing exploration of the wonders of flight and the way different species have evolved different solutions to the problem of defying gravity – including humans”, and it’s certainly stuffed full of facts. We meet bees that beat their wings 230 times per second, the extinct pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, with its 10-metre wingspan, and Arctic terns that travel 75,000 kilometres every year.

The Three Gorges Dam is opened to release floodwater in 2024

Cynthia Lee / Alamy

by Fred Mills

At 185 metres high and 2300 metres long, the Three Gorges Dam, spanning the Yangtze river in Hubei province, China, is the biggest dam in the world. Among other claims, the dam, says NASA, shifted Earth’s axis by about 2 centimetres and slightly shortened the planet’s day by approximately 0.06 microseconds. But that would come as no surprise to Fred Mills, the author of Mega Builds: Ten colossal construction projects that will change our world. Mills looks set to take us on a tour designed to convince us that modern engineering is a truly revolutionary force. As founder of The B1M YouTube channel, specialising in construction and with over 4 million subscribers, this should be a breeze for him, as he goes on a quest round the world to explore everything from a “170km-long smart city in Saudi Arabia, to Japan’s levitating railway”.

The best new science documentaries of 2026

From Green Planet II to Tim Spector's What Not to Eat, there's plenty to look forward to from this year's science shows, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley

by David Shukman

A “blistering and whistleblowing account of how Britain has joined the frontline of the world’s climate emergency, an exposé of how dangerously unprepared we are, and a vital roadmap towards a better future”, say the hopeful publishers about The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes by David Shukman. He’s a leading climate journalist and was a BBC climate correspondent for 20 years. This book sounds amazingly terrifying and has fans ranging from Tim Peake (“While I saw the fragile beauty of our planet from space, David Shukman reveals how incredibly vulnerable we are on the ground”) to the redoubtable climate negotiator and UN veteran Christiana Figueres (“A vital wake-up call for a world already on the frontlines. This is climate change stripped of rhetoric and abstraction, delivered at the painful ground level”).

Striking photo essay examines deadly spread of dengue fever in Nepal

Liz Else — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:00:48 +0000

Researchers have found Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes and their larvae in Chandannath, Nepal, a high-altitude area

Yuri Segalerba

These striking photographs tell a deadly story about climate change and dengue fever, generally the world’s fastest-spreading mosquito-borne disease. Photographer ’s photo essay The Ascent of Temperatures explores how dengue has spread to Nepal’s Himalayan districts, including Chandannath, which, at 2438 metres above sea level, is one of the highest towns where Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes and their larvae have been discovered. Previously, these mosquitoes, which transmit dengue and other diseases, had been observed only at elevations of up to 2100 metres, according to the photographer. Segalerba has been exploring “how traditional knowledge systems respond to external pressures”, and was investigating the spread of dengue into high-altitude areas in the Peruvian Andes when he learned of what was happening in Nepal. “It turned out to be the clearest setting for that question: a millennia-old medical tradition with its own framework for understanding illness, suddenly facing a disease it had never encountered before,” he says. Recently, dengue has spread across most of Nepal, fuelled by climate change as well as increasing travel. According to , at least six people died of dengue in 2025 and around 9000 were infected, with the virus now having spread to 76 out of the country’s 77 districts.

A female Aedes aegypti mosquito seen close up

Yuri Segalerba

Above, a female Aedes aegypti mosquito is shown in detail under a microscope. The Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC), working with the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, examines larvae and adult mosquitoes for changes in colour or shape that show they are becoming resistant to insecticides or adapting to different altitudes. Below, Ishan Gautam, associate professor and chief of the Natural History Museum at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, shows Aedes larvae to students at Geetamata Secondary School, also in Kathmandu. The university organises awareness campaigns where local people are shown live Aedes mosquito larvae, and learn about their breeding habits and the importance of removing potential breeding sites like stagnant water.

Students examine Aedes larvae during an awareness campaign organised by Tribhuvan University

Yuri Segalerba

In the image below, Amchi Khedup Loden Gurung packs traditional Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan) medicines in a clinic in Jomsom, northern Nepal.

Traditional Tibetan healer Amchi Khedup Loden Gurung prepares medicines in a clinic in Jomsom, Nepal

Mosquito nets are being encouraged around Chandannath: below, local resident Devi Kannya Katayata breastfeeds her son Nehan Budha under a net at home.

People are being encouraged to use mosquito nets in Chandannath, Nepal, following an unprecedented spread of the dengue virus in areas 2400 metres or more above sea level

Yuri Segalerba

In the image below, Sunita Baral, a PhD student at the NHRC, examines a mosquito inside a rearing cage. The council studies larvae and adult specimens from many habitats to discover more about the dengue-carrying mosquitoes circulating across Nepal.

A mosquito is captured in a rearing cage at the Nepal Health Research Council laboratories

Yuri Segalerba

Below, sheets are seen drying in the sun in the courtyard of Pokhara Hospital. Pokhara is the main gateway to the high-altitude region of Mustang, where Segalerba says dengue cases have recently been reported. Experts fear reported cases are a small fraction of the true infection level, he says, because around 90 per cent of infected people are asymptomatic, and many cases and deaths may go unreported.

Sheets dry in the courtyard of Pokhara Hospital, Nepal

Yuri Segalerba

The best new popular science books of April 2026

Liz Else — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:00:36 +0000

Christopher Cokinos’s history of the moon Still As Bright is out this month. Pictured is a supermoon in January 2026, seen behind illuminated Christmas lights

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

April is said to be the cruellest month, as the poem goes, “mixing memory with desire”. And this is oddly reflected in some of the non-fiction books we’ve rounded up for you this month. There’s the life spent largely in a log cabin, often with only trees and other non-human life for company. Then there’s the problem of reconciling science with life’s toughest questions – and lived experience. Or how about an inspiring journey though the moon’s history, in the month we actually head back to it for the first time in 50 years? Perhaps you should really go for it and share one researcher’s tough quest to end violence, and another’s to future-proof our brains for the 21^st century. Buckle up for some bumpy emotions this month.

by Bernd Heinrich

One for naturalists who like spending a lot of time out in the woods. This, say his publishers, is the life of Bernd Heinrich – a former professor of entomology, a biologist, a naturalist and runner – who, for much of the year, lives in the cabin he built amid a “vast sea of spruce, fir and larch in the mountains of western Maine”. He’s been doing this on and off for some 40 years, facing, with the rest of the life around him, vast changes in the landscape as it is covered in snow, gives way to summer heat and sometimes is beset by fire, drought and flood. The “common uncommon” of the title reflects the characteristics of the spiders, ants, chestnut trees, porcupines, owls and mice in the woods near him. It’s ��“a narrative of small surprises in nature, some delightful and some – brought on by climate change – devastating, all seen through the sharp eye of a world-renowned naturalist”.�� Apart from the climate change, it sounds like Heinrich is a bit of a modern-day Thoreau, and his log cabin a stand-in for that occupied by the 19th-century writer, who isolated himself with nature in Walden, Massachusetts – albeit just for two years.

A statue of Henry Thoreau by the shores of Walden Pond

Shutterstock/Jay Yuan

by Gary Slutkin

Gary Slutkin is a man on a very big mission. Here, he sets out his big idea: we can end violence by recasting it as an epidemic which can be interrupted, controlled and ultimately eliminated. Slutkin is an epidemiologist who earned his spurs tackling the spread of TB in San Francisco in the early 1980s, then moving on to work on cholera and TB in Somalia. From 1987, he worked at the World Health Organization on HIV and AIDS epidemics in Africa. Back in the US, two killings by 12-year-olds prompted him to look closely at violence, where he found the greatest predictor of a shooting is a prior shooting – like an infectious disease, exposure is crucial and so is social acceptance within a group. Slutkin set up Cure Violence Global, and his programmes to “cure” violence look to have been successful where they’ve been applied, so his book should make a fascinating and rewarding read.

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Vincenzo Levizzani

Just imagine being a professor of cloud physics. That’s Vincenzo Levizzani’s job and by the sound of his book, his vocation too. In The Book of Clouds: How to read the sky, he sets out to get us all to pay more than aesthetic attention to clouds by replacing our ignorance with what looks to be a very decent grounding. And yes, he cites lots of art and cultural cloud references, from chunks of Shelley’s poem The Cloud (Prometheus Unbound) to Cesare Pavese’s Grappa in September (Hard Labor). But if you want to recognise those clouds, find out how they form and create rain (among other aspects of their behaviour) and, of course, discover how climate change is affecting them, then this is for you. There are wonderful graphics and photos – and a glossary so you know a dropsonde from a graupel.

Vincenzo Levizzani’s The Book of Clouds is out in April

Sue Robinson/Alamy

by Richard Elwes

Googology has everything to do with huge numbers – and nothing at all to do with a certain search engine. Those huge numbers are the stuff (and title) of a new book by Elwes, a mathematician and presenter of Numberphile (a YouTube channel – come on, keep up at the back). According to its publishers, Huge Numbers shows how counting has shaped human thought. Elwes himself describes it all as a “human story”, stretching from the distant past to the far future. There are two main strands here.Firstly, he asks how big are the numbers people need and which ones mark our world’s outer limits? Secondly, what systems do we use for describing or processing these numbers? What are the biggest values they can cope with before they break down? Can you even name the largest number? I defy you not to laugh out loud at least twice.

by Hannah Critchlow

We live in supercharged, hyper-connected, thrilling yet downright scary times, as wave after wave of unprecedented change fuelled by AI and other forces crash over us. Is this, as some thinkers argue, a full-on major evolutionary transition? Will we have to rethink the nature of the biology of human intelligence, identity and individuality, as culture becomes the dominant driving force? What will we become? In The 21st Century Brain, neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow, an academic at the University of Cambridge and a public intellectual, takes all of this on – and according to her publisher, emerges with hopes that we can future-proof our brains. Her optimism looks to be based on humans drawing on innate capacities, skills and virtues, such as problem-solving, flexibility, curiosity, creativity, courage, empathy and communication. Given the widespread fear of governance by algorithm, of information distortion or hijack, not to mention of the power of social media to destroy childhoods and calls to ban smart phones for under-16s, let’s fervently hope she is right.

How is AI changing our brains? Neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow explores in The 21st Century Brain

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

by Nobuko Nakano

Now here’s a topic guaranteed to entice and enrage in equal measure: the nature of luck and what we can learn from people who call themselves “lucky”. A sneak-peek at Nobuko Nakano’s Lucky People – a bestseller in Japan – shows that it aims to both deconstruct the idea that luck is random and encourage us to think that lucky people are, for all sorts of reasons, running different “neurological software” from the unlucky ones – software that can be installed. Among the things shaping this lucky personality that we can cultivate, Nakano says, are the brain changes that happen when we shift perception from detecting threats to seeing opportunities. Then there is possessing a positive self-image and generosity toward other people, and regular sleeping and rising habits – preferably early bird rather than night owl. Prayer is also in the mix. Fascinating stuff.

by Kathryn Paige Harden

Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden definitely needs its subtitle to reassure readers that we haven’t suddenly retitled the magazine New Theologist. So here it is: The genetics of wrongdoing, the problem of blame and the future of forgiveness. Harden, director of the developmental behaviour genetic lab at the University of Texas, studies some of the most important questions in modern life: how do we take responsibility for the people we become, knowing how we are shaped by both biology and experience? And what should we do when people hurt each other – or themselves? And has science made guilt obsolete? These are the ancient tensions between nature and nurture, freedom and constraint, the desire to punish and the longing to forgive. Let’s hope it delivers on such rare promise.

by Guilia Enders

Author and doctor Giulia Enders’s Gut was a bestseller, taking us on an unexpectedly fascinating voyage of the complex digestive system and covering the vital gut-brain connection, the importance of the microbiome and the impact of gut health on mental health. She is back with a new offering, Organ Speak: What it really means to listen to our bodies, which has already spent over six weeks at the top of the German bestseller list, say its publishers. This one could be even more surprising, with its message to look inside to better understand life outside. We can expect to be guided through our inner landscape and meet “the unseen heroes of our bodies”, as Enders explains how our organs have responded to challenges with astonishing intelligence – and just how much they have to teach us. What, for example, can the immune system tell us about our need to feel safe? And how does the process of wound-healing mirror emotional recovery? The bottom line is: what do we truly need to thrive? Definitely another one to watch out for – oh, and celebrity epidemiologist Tim Spector calls it a “thrilling journey through health and disease – seen through the secret lives of our cells and organs”.

by Christopher Cokinos

The moon is definitely back on the agenda with the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission around the moon, sending four astronauts on a 10-day flight. The publication of Still as Bright: An illuminating history of the moon, from antiquity to tomorrow could hardly be better timed. Writer Christopher Cokinos tells the story of the moon over time and space, describing its role in the beliefs of ancient cultures and the science of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, from the obsessions of 19th-century “selenographers” to the astronauts of Apollo, and now, Artemis II. The book also tracks Cokinos’s own lunar adventures as he explores the surface of the Moon using only his backyard telescope. The publishers call it a “cultural and scientific history, as well as memoir… a thoughtful, deeply moving, evergreen natural history”. For all sorts of reasons, readers will never look at the moon the same way again.

by Lucy Rogers

We all scan the skies for signs of rain or sun, or just to look at the delightful clouds that change shape as they speed by. Then there’s the birds, effortlessly soaring, swooping or creating spectacularly improbable formations. Lucy Rogers’s book Up: A scientist’s guide to the magic above us, explores “the beauty, science, and surprises of the world above” as she travels the world: stopping off at a kite market in India, at the Borneo jungle to see bats as they pour out of a cave at dusk, and in Mexico to witness a total solar eclipse. Up��definitely sounds like it’s one for all of us who crave a glimpse of the aurora borealis or marvel at the ingenuity of flight. Rogers is an engineer (she’s worked on space-debris-mitigation technologies, and you might have seen her as a judge in the BBC TV show��Robot Wars) so the sense of wonder and quest for marvels will be well grounded. Looking forward to it.

Ijeoma Uchegbu’s Chain Reaction is out this month

Ijeoma Uchegbu/CC BY-SA 4.0

by Ijeoma Uchegbu

Where would we be without chemistry quietly holding our chaotic world together? Every aspect of life is chemically mediated: from our DNA, resting tightly within our cells, to how we treat illnesses and physically build our world, to the chemical makeup of PFAs – the “forever chemicals” that are so terrifyingly good at sticking around. In her book, Chain Reaction, Ijeoma Uchegbu, professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience at University College London, reminds us of this science we take for granted and tells us about the chemistry which has shaped her own life.

A new book from Rebecca Solnit, promising to bring us hope in these “difficult times”, is among our pick of popular science titles out this month – along with a guide on how to talk to AI, and a look at modern warfare

by Helen Pearson

Helen Pearson is a seasoned editor at one of the world’s leading science journals so it seems fitting that she should tell the extraordinary story of how evidence, rather than opinion, is now seen as the only way to guide human decisions. This “evidence revolution”, say the publishers of her new book Beyond Belief, is a global effort to science-ify policy. This involves using data and scientific methods to discover what really works for questions such as: if police patrols reduce crime, are performance appraisals effective in actually boosting performance? Or can evidence show whether smaller classes help students – and, currently, shed light on whether smartphones really harm teenagers? Policy has always suffered from problems with evidence – possibly because it wasn’t available, or wasn’t in an accessible, timely form. Even medicine has had to creep forward, often relying on doctors’ opinions and conventional wisdom, rather than solid science. Looking forward to the nuts and bolts of this read.

The best new popular science books of March 2026

Liz Else — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:00:31 +0000

Rebecca Solnit has a new book out this month

Trent Davis Bailey

March, in the northern hemisphere anyway, is about venturing out for some much-needed vitamin D and dodging showers. Forget that – just head for a decent café where you can delve into the marvellous science books we’ve got waiting for you. This month you can explore how animals shaped our world, how to spot liars from their language, what forest trees can tell us – and flowers as revolutionaries. There is some stronger stuff too, if you are in the mood: try AI in the hands of the US military, or a deep cultural look at how our world has changed beyond recognition. Whatever your choice, it’s all guaranteed to enrich the inner you.

by Megha Mohan

What would a world look like if women made the rules? In one still run largely by men, it’s an interesting question. According to her publishers, author Megha Mohan was inspired by her great-grandmother’s matrilineal community in South India to scour the world in search of “lessons from societies where women make the rules”. Such societies have always existed, with modern micro-examples including South Korea’s unique online feminist trolls, co-housing experiments in Paris and North London and the Rain Queens of South Africa. And what might different ways of collaborating, working, child rearing – above all, power and identity structures – look like in such a world? Mohan– the BBC’s first global gender and identity correspondent in 2018 – explores.

by Jamie Bartlett

Are you getting the best out of AI? Assuming you have increasingly little choice in the matter, it’s probably a plan to buckle down and read up. To judge by Jamie Bartlett’s earlier work, especially The Dark Net, How to Talk to AI promises to deliver on the nitty-gritty of how AI thinks and reasons and the best ways to exploit its (sorry) super-human abilities. Expect to learn how some folks are turbo-charging work and everyday life with AI, while others are falling down conspiracy rabbit holes and/or experiencing psychosis.

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Suzanne Simard

It’s a fair claim to say (as her publisher does) that Suzanne Simard has helped transform our understanding of the profound intelligence and interconnectedness of trees. The bestselling author of��Finding the Mother Tree, she is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she leads The Mother Tree Project – and has a global reputation for research on tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and diversity of forests. Her new book, When the Forest Breathes, taps into the deep-rooted cycles of renewal that sustain the forest and how they can also help us to protect the world’s ecosystem. Simard grew up in British Columbia, in a family of loggers committed to sustainable stewardship, so her life has been a very singularly committed one – which often makes for a great book. Here’s hoping.

by Michael Bond

Michael Bond is a former ��è��Ƶ staffer and author of a growing pile of books exploring the inner world of how we shape each other (peer pressure, fans, belonging) and the outer world (wayfaring and his own family’s part in settling the Canadian prairies). This time he sets off on a connected but different track, exploring how animals shaped our minds and cultures, “from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were rewired by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to the medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy”. If everything that was thought to make us human is shared with other creatures, who are we and what is our place in the world? What is the new order? Looking forward to this one.

by��Kirsty King

Can you spot a liar, or separate truth from fiction? Who do you trust in these mendacious, deepfake days? Forensic psychologist Kirsty King may have a new way to help us weave our way through the lies we all tell to keep our lives going, and the bigger ones that are extremely damaging. We need all the help we can get here, given the failure of other approaches such as physiology (think micro-expressions and the like). So, can lies be exposed by paying close attention to the language liars use? Drawing on research from forensic linguistics and psychology, King shares real-life case studies and stories to explore the “tells”. Should be a fascinating read.

A tea plant – as featured in David George Haskell’s new book

Blickwinkel / Alamy

by David George Haskell

It’s a big claim: without flowers, human beings would not exist. But sounds like environmental scientist David George Haskell can back up the publishing hype in How Flowers Made Our World – subtitled “The story of nature’s revolutionaries”. He delves into everything from the “fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we’ve been missing”, to the power of plants as inventive agents, able to “build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies; and even ocean shores”. Looking to the future, he says that flowers “offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change”. Lots to celebrate there then.

by Rebecca Solnit

We may not have the world promised by Star Trek and the like, but anyone living in a sealed off bunker for the past fifty or sixty years would still emerge into the sunlight blinking at the political landscape of the 21st century. Rebecca Solnit has been at the forefront of thinking about this for quite a while, winning plaudits and nominations for book awards as she goes. Her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End, her publisher says, “is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach”. Let’s hope so.

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to popular science reading this month, with new titles by major names including Maggie Aderin and Michael Pollan

by Lixing Sun

What’s not to like in a book about sex? Even better, a book about sex in animals– which promises to tell “the weird and wonderful science of how our planet is populated”. This is one of ��è��Ƶ’s 2026 books to watch out for, and its author, Lixing Sun, is a professor of biology at Central Washington University. A sneak peek reveals, among much else, that the female mole is a “true rebel of the animal kingdom” with both ovaries and testes – and that California condors are capable of immaculate conception.

by Katrina Manson

Could this book be any more timely? Project Maven��by Katrina Manson is a kind-of briefing for the hell we see on our screens every night as Operation Epic Fury unfolds in the Middle East. Manson tells the chilling story of how the US Department of Defense launched Project Maven in 2017– an initiative designed to harness artificial intelligence for military targeting. She is a Bloomberg reporter who covers national security and cutting-edge tech, so you can be pretty sure she will know what she’s writing about. This looks to be fascinating and compelling stuff– but you may need a strong stomach.

by F. Marina Schauffler

We’re fast getting used to the acronym PFAS to describe per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and the horrifying global environmental legacy trailing in the wake of what are labelled “forever chemicals”. These invisible, hard-to-remove chemicals are in the blood of most people on Earth, as they permeate everyday life and the natural world. Journalist Marina Schauffler zeros in on Maine, the US’s most north-easterly state. She tells the stories of farmers, firefighters, tribal members, researchers, everyday homeowners and officials as they suffer from, or fight back against, PFAS contamination in a place known for its rich farms, woods and waters – and, apparently, at the forefront of PFAS testing and regulation. The poignant accounts here may be from the US, but it could equally well be somewhere near you.

The best new popular science books of February 2026

Liz Else — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:00:24 +0000

Space scientist Maggie Aderin has a new book out this month

Steven May / Alamy Stock Photo

It’s nowhere near early enough for those of us in the northern hemisphere to start struggling against winter’s somnolent spell, so there’s no need for excuses as you take to your bed with a pile of good books. And there’s plenty to keep you occupied while you eschew the chilly outdoors. This month, we have climate hope from a well-placed environmental reporter, formerly of this parish, an honest memoir from a star scientist and a jaw-dropping account of the commodification of women’s bodies. Given the Valentine’s Day fun this month, we also have a book that may challenge what we thought we knew about finding love. It’s always good to get all the help we can in that department – enjoy!

by Maggie Aderin

“On clear moonlit nights we sometimes step outside and howl at the moon together. It is cathartic, primal and a really good laugh. I am not sure what our neighbours think about it, though.” That’s Maggie Aderin, describing how she and her daughter share their love of the moon in her memoir, Starchild. Aderin is one of the UK’s top science popularisers (a co-host of the BBC’s astronomy programme, The Sky at Night) and has groundbreaking work on the James Webb and Gemini telescopes under her belt. Oh, and there’s a “Dame” in front of her name in recognition of her work – and a Barbie doll of her made by Mattel. Starchild is the story of her complicated early life (custody battles, 13 schools in 12 years, dyslexia), and how she came to set her ambitions on star science, only to end up the only Black woman on her physics course at Imperial College London. From the sneakiest of sneak peeks, it looks like a thoroughly engaging read – and the kind of honest memoir you wish more scientists would turn out.

Clear out your shelves for a bumper new crop of books by authors including Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit and Xand Van Tulleken, says culture editor Alison Flood

by Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland

How do our brains turn relatively simple units – biological neurons – into a mind? It’s quite a story: with 86 billion neurons making an estimated 100 trillion connections across neural networks, the human brain is a miracle of complexity. But the assembly that underpins human intelligence, desire and even consciousness also allows mind-like abilities to emerge in machines built using artificial neurons – and our chatbots use artificial neural networks originally developed as models of the mind. How does it all work – and where does it leave AI? A good place to look for answers is The Emergent Mind by Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland. The two academics straddle computational neuroscience, experimental psychology, computer science and linguistics. And their book comes highly recommended by such luminaries as Geoffrey Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel for physics, and Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind.

by Paul Eastwick

Is the object of your affections a 9, while you are just a 5? Are some folk just not “marriage material”? These sound like crude assessments to use when looking for romantic connection, yet much of the world seems hooked on this kind of thinking. But just how scientific is it really? Luckily, it looks as if we may soon have some evidence-based answers, judging by Bonded By Evolution by Paul Eastwick. He’s a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, and director of its Attraction and Relationship Research Laboratory, and he says those ideas have penetrated deep into our culture, creating narratives that make us despair about relationships or, worse, fuel misogyny and violence. Here’s hoping science can come to the rescue.

Michael Pollan tackles the thorny topic of consciousness in his new book

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by Michael Pollan

With 350 theories of consciousness on the table, is there room for even one more? Luckily, A World Appears isn’t really another contender. For one thing, it’s by Michael Pollan, a writer and thinker who somehow manages to be both left-field and highly influential through books about our relationship with plants and psychedelic drugs, especially How to Change Your Mind. And this book seems to be not so much theoretical as experiential, with Pollan using many different lenses (neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, psychedelic) to explore the field in a personal manner. He starts with a chapter about the famous wager between neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers more than 25 years ago on whether science would have an explanation for consciousness by 2023. Given the scale of the problem, 25 years plus isn’t really that long – so Pollan ends up in a cave outside Santa Fe looking for different kind of answers and offers a wonderful exit quote: ”I open my eyes and a world appears…” Great stuff.

by Sarah Alam Malik

Any book with a title like that is bound to put you in mind of Stephen Hawking – and take you right back to 1988 when A Brief History of Time came out to great acclaim – and even greater sales. But there’s a subtitle in parentheses after the ‘Universe’ – (and our place in it) – which throws a switch on things and brings this new exploration of cosmology up to date, putting more emphasis on the people doing the work. Sarah Alam Malik’s own field is dark matter, so she and Hawking would have found some common ground in the weeds of big science.

Sarah Alam Malik tackles the mysteries of the universe in her new book. Shown here are The Fighting Dragons of Ara, an emission nebula about 4000 light-years away

Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne

How could forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne follow on from their earlier book, The Devil You Know, which journeyed into the hell of the people who commit the worst acts in the world? The subtitle explains that we will be getting “Stories of survival and transformation after trauma” – in other words, and in a very real sense, the other end of the stick. This time, we will share the burden of trauma – or maybe, survival – of other kinds of terrible acts. According to publishers Faber & Faber, among the book’s eight case studies are a war widow who dares not utter her husband’s name, a former prisoner of war who will not speak of his ordeal even decades later, and a child hostage who cannot speak at all. What happens to them all? Their journey makes a powerful experience. As Adshead says: “They spoke of the unspeakable to me… and thus found a way… to get through their experiences.”

by Adrian Woolfson

This is probably one of the most challenging of this month’s books. Unless, of course, you are some sort of synthetic biology guru already. Assuming you aren’t, On the Future of Species has a clear agenda: Adrian Woolfson imagines a new world, one in which your home builds itself, your clothes talk back to you, disease is no more and we may even live longer. In other words, life itself will have been decoupled from Darwinian evolution and become computable. And AI will drive the project as it converges with synthetic biology to become something quite new, what Woolfson calls artificial biological intelligence. It all depends, says Woolfson, founder of the genome writing company Genyro, on decoding the generative grammar of DNA. It may then be possible to construct wholly new genomes or rewrite our own if we want. And if all this works out even a bit, then we will want to. Fascinatingly scary stuff to huddle under the duvet with. What could possibly go wrong?

by Joanna Cheek

We’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid: you are responsible for you; no matter how bad you feel, you have agency, you can improve your life – in fact, only you can! And so on. But what if you don’t feel you have agency? What if the world is rolling over you, making you depressed and anxious? And breathe… Or better, reach out for a book that at least promises to let you off the hook a bit. It’s Not You, It’s the World by psychiatrist and medical journalist Joanna Cheek asks whether our mental health struggles aren’t actually signs that we’re broken, but proof that we’re responding normally to a world in crisis. The book reminds us that 1 in 2 of us will be diagnosed with a mental health condition by the age of 40, and Cheek argues that our symptoms are, in fact, alarms – and that our defence systems are working exactly as they should in response to threatening circumstances. Best of all, Cheek sets out to show how self-improvement alone neglects the source of our difficulties, and that to truly heal, we must address the imbalances in our wider systems that keep making us all sick. If she delivers even a little of what we’re promised, it will be a great relief.

Joanna Cheek suggests that our mental health struggles are a normal response to a world in crisis in her new book

Aliraza Khatri/Getty Images

by Fay Bound-Alberti

It was apparently following a diagnosis of prosopagnosia (face blindness) that cultural historian Fay Bound-Alberti was inspired to write her new book, The Face. This kind of ironic driver makes you wonder what she makes of her own face. After all, we are living in a world where we must unlock our phones with facial recognition, our faces are stamped in our passports, and no matter how we age or are changed through accident or illness, they remain a foundational marker of identity. Bound-Alberti is the founder of the Centre for Technology and the Body at King’s College London, where she leads Interface, the world’s first project examining technologies of the face. So, given her background and condition, we should expect a compelling exploration of how the face has shaped identity and social meaning through time. Publishers Penguin say we will discover how new technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood, starting with the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and traveling through the mass production of mirrors and photography in the 19th century to today’s digital avatars and face transplants.

by Fred Pearce

Everyone expects gloom and doom from environmental and climate experts. But Fred Pearce, a staffer and consultant for ��è��Ƶ for many years, is one of the last people on earth to jump into any such neat box. Yes, things are bad and the list of problems endless: extinctions are accelerating, plastics and pollution choke our seas and skies, water cycles (and glaciers) are collapsing. But his purpose is to “shine a light on solutions and offer hope in dark times… Too much pessimism can be the enemy of the very action we need.” While accepting the damage done, Pearce finds reasons (seven, actually) reflected in chapters with titles ranging from “Nature is finding a way”, and “The population bomb is being defused” to “The miracle of the commons”. Fearing that he might sound Panglossian, in the end Pearce’s hope comes down to two things: nature’s ability to regrow, adapt and restore itself; and humans themselves, and our ability to adapt, not just technically but socially, and to rediscover the wisdom of older ways: “to imagine the best, then mobilize and act on it”. Who wouldn’t say amen to that?

by Alev Scott

From the end of the 20^th century, women’s fertility has increasingly become all about technology, money and morality. Twenty-five years into the 21^st century, the questions just keep on coming. Here’s a selection from Cash Cow by Alev Scott, one of the first books to bring it all together in a detailed, often undercover investigation of the whole area. Should women be paid to be surrogates or should this be an altruistic act – or even legal at all? Why should women pay more for “VIP” egg donors and to view their photos? Is it right to charge for breast milk? If so, how much – and who should be allowed to buy it? Then there’s the issue of one person’s biological bad luck being another’s gain as the example of women’s eggs – from freezing to selling – shows all too clearly. Scott’s account looks to be riveting for everyone who cares about the increasing commodification of women’s bodies and the horror show of the (largely ignored) emotional and ethical issues it raises.

��by Jo Marchant

Former ��è��Ƶ staffer Jo Marchant has form – in a good way. Among the books she has written, she is probably best known for Decoding the Heavens, about the��Antikythera mechanism, an ancient device��designed to calculate��astronomical��positions that is popularly known as the first known mechanical computer. Her latest book is very different. It’s her personal quest in search of “now” –what it means to live in the present, right here, right now. Who hasn’t asked themselves that? Illusion or not, we feel the present is, in every sense, all we have or can have. But physics finds no universal “now”. The book is an existential quest: drawing on neuroscience, psychology, cosmology, religion, history and much more. In it, Marchant delves deep into the weeds of lived experience (mystical or otherwise) and possibly the nature of reality itself. As she writes, “Perhaps, with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.”

A host of new science books are due to hit shelves in January, by authors including Claudia Hammond, Deborah Cohen and Daisy Fancourt

��by Jo Wimpenny

Everyone loves an underdog. Except when it comes to certain animals, or why would zoologist Jo Wimpenny feel the need to make the case for “rethinking nature’s least loved animals”? It turns out, there are good reasons for rehabilitating creatures that we perceive as harmful, thus wasps provide free pest control, snakes offer venom that might help with cancer, and crocodiles and vultures can teach us about social bonds. Then there is the even bigger picture: losing certain animals, no matter how repulsive, would devastate ecosystems. And all sorts of creatures are being found to possess intelligence way beyond our expectations. We clearly have no business disliking any creature. Still, at least we no longer persecute animals for “crimes” as we did in the Middle Ages. Small mercies…

��by Evan Selinger and Albert Fox Cahn

Just in case you don’t get the title, it’s a play on that famous tech bro quote (by Mark Zuckerberg to be precise) about moving fast and breaking things. That once sounded pretty sexy, all that innovation, disruption and speed. Except that it also spawned a techno-utopian culture of fabricated benefits and minimised harms. The opposite may be less frantic. More, er, evidence-based, even. It definitely sounds like it’s worth taking a close look at how we got here and what it would take to create a responsible innovation culture. And to make it sound sexy.

The best new popular science books of January 2026

Liz Else — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:00:17 +0000

Megan Eaves-Egenes’s Nightfaring explores our connection with the night sky

Shutterstock / danm12

Here in the northern hemisphere, January always feels like the longest, drabbest month of the year, so how lucky we are to have a host of new science books to enliven our days. This month, we can explore everything from what the arts bring to our lives to the unsung hero that is friction. How about the origin of ideas? Or what we lose when we light up our skies? Perhaps January isn’t long enough…

Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure investigates the impact of the arts, including dancing, on our minds and bodies

EMILY KASK/AFP via Getty Images

by Daisy Fancourt

What if playing the piano, dancing, visiting art galleries or even lying in the mud listening to Wolf Alice at Glastonbury was good for the body, mind and longevity? Or what if it could help us develop brain resilience against dementia? That’s just part of the tantalising, ambitious pitch by Daisy Fancourt in her new book. In theory, she’s well-placed to make the case as a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London��and director of the WHO’s arts and health initiative. British TV doctor Xand van Tulleken is calling it an “amazing antidote” to the “deluge of nonsense” we’re given daily about how to live better. A licence to have fun – what’s not to love?

by Charles Knowles

Here’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves – and promptly poured another glass as we ponder. The story of why we use alcohol for everything from celebrating to de-stressing and fitting in (biology, not moral failing) is in the hands of surgeon and clinical researcher Charles Knowles. As he just happens to be a recovering alcoholic, this should be the ultimate insider view on what happens in our brains, why and how alcohol hijacks our survival instincts, overrides the ability to choose, and, crucially, how drinking can spiral out of control. Even more crucially, he has a scientific “blueprint” for how to escape this vicious cycle. Less moralising and more sciencing –��good call.

Women's hidden extra work, positive tipping points and new thinking on autism – there's much to chew on in this year's best reads, says Liz Else

by Deborah Cohen

We all do it – run to the internet to look for help when we’re sick. Or if we want to become the best version of ourselves – with wonderfully low blood pressure, perfect blood sugar, not a smidge of excess fat, and perfectly focused on being happy, successful citizens. But who are these experts who live online, who don’t know our personal medical history? Science writer Deborah Cohen asks why we would trust them with our lives, given no evidence of their qualifications or impartiality. Good question. Hope she’s got some good answers.

Kenneth R. Rosen’s Polar War looks into the struggle for power in the Arctic

Shutterstock/muratart

by Kenneth R. Rosen

What happens as the Arctic melts is something we will all have to wake up to – and fast – as pipelines are sabotaged, global communications lines breached, and untapped natural resources are exposed in a new race for position and power? No wonder geopolitical writer and sometime war correspondent Kenneth Rosen has got stuck into a world that will justify the book’s subtitle: “submarines, spies and the struggle for power in a melting Arctic”. Terrifying, in a good way.

by Charles Foster

Does everything have start in the centre – from big cities, established ideas, from convention in all its forms? No, says Charles Foster, in what looks to be a thought-provoking countertheory: the best ideas happen at the edges. In what is billed as a “fascinating and philosophical travel book”, Foster sets out for “the far frontiers of the planet… and of human culture and consciousness to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and of life itself”. Stirring stuff if it delivers on even half of this.

by Claudia Hammond

Forget the festive period: everyday life feels accelerated, with too much to do and less time in which to do it. This phenomenon has even got a name for the effect it produces – overwhelm. How do we make it stop? BBC journalist Claudia Hammond takes this on, dividing her book into chapters addressing everything from procrastination to the fear of regret, the drive to perfectionism and endless to-do lists. She offers a psychological toolkit and a pile of science to stop us from burning out among her “ways to take the pressure off”, as the book’s subtitle flags up. Timely, for sure.

Aimee Donnellan’s Off the Scales tells the story of the rise of Ozempic

Michael Siluk/Alamy

by Aimee Donnellan

Whether you’re fighting to lose weight or concerned about the implications of getting what you think you want, GLP-1 drug Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs are bound to make more headlines this year. Reuters columnist Aimee Donnellan is out to weave together the inside story of the race by Novo Nordisk to develop a ”cure” for obesity with Ozempic, a diabetes medication that targets the GLP-1 hormone and makes people feel fuller for longer, with economics, politics, social implications – and the underlying�� scientific question: are these drugs too good to be true?

by Megan Eaves-Egenes

Every year, our night skies are getting at least 120 per cent brighter – and this isn’t just a big deal for astronomers, but also for our wildlife (not to mention our sleep cycles). In Nightfaring, travel writer and “dark sky” advocate Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world to get to grips with our connection with the night sky. Billed as a way of “finding solace in the stars at a time of difficulty in her own life”, she embarks on a journey that takes her from New Zealand to Uzbekistan, Italy to Japan, Germany to the Himalayas, exploring what darkness means globally and over time – and most of all, it seems, what we are in danger of losing.

by Jennifer Vail

The story of an invisible force can make great reading – and the “biography” of friction, as author Jennifer Vail calls it, seems promisingly left-field. We’re talking here about the force that resists motion we encounter in daily life (think creaking door hinges, or car tyres worn smooth by the motorway), but also its power from the first spark of fire through the industrial revolution to the unexpected role in the race to understand viruses, and lots more. It is an unsung hero to most (though not, of course, to Newton, da Vinci and their ilk) – though hopefully not for much longer.

by Toby Walsh

From Ada Lovelace’s pioneering algorithms and Alan Turing’s famous test of machine intelligence to Deep Blue’s chess victory, ChatGPT, this is pitched as a whistlestop tour of the monuments and failures in the great and unfolding AI story. It looks fun, from a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The big question, of course, is: can this huge story really be contained in a short book? Well, Carlo Rovelli managed it for physics, so fingers crossed.

The 13 best popular science books of 2025

Liz Else — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Women's hidden extra work, positive tipping points and new thinking on autism – there's much to chew on in this year's best reads, says Liz Else

Liz Else, Author at ��è����Ƶ

The best new popular science books of July 2026

by Valerie Tiberius

by Richard Coker

by Tamie Jovanelly

by Rod Flower

by Roopika Risam

Sign up to Book Club

by Ian Bogost

by Dan Werb

��by Sue Black

by Eleanor Drage

by Melanie Challenger

The 17 best popular science books of 2026 so far

The best new popular science books of June 2026

(editor-in-chief Alice Roberts)

�� by Saira Hameed

by Rowan Hooper

by Darby Saxbe

by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao

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by Leroy Chiao with Victoria Bruce

by Brian Clegg

by Kojo Koram

��by Jessica Pykett

by Janet L. Jones

by Louis Lefebvre, translated by Pablo Strauss

by Beeban Kidron

by Michael Handford

The best new popular science books of May 2026

by Simon Rogers

by Courtney Conley and Milica McDowell

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

by Vincent Doumeizel (translated by Charlotte Coombe)

by Turi King

by Helen Pilcher

by Dr Nick Barber

by Dave Goulson

by Simon Barnes

by Fred Mills

by David Shukman

Striking photo essay examines deadly spread of dengue fever in Nepal

The best new popular science books of April 2026

by Bernd Heinrich

by Gary Slutkin

by Vincenzo Levizzani

by Richard Elwes

by Hannah Critchlow

by Nobuko Nakano

by Kathryn Paige Harden

by Guilia Enders

by Christopher Cokinos

by Lucy Rogers

by Ijeoma Uchegbu

by Helen Pearson

The best new popular science books of March 2026

by Megha Mohan

by Jamie Bartlett

by Suzanne Simard

by Michael Bond

by��Kirsty King

by David George Haskell

by Rebecca Solnit

by Lixing Sun

by Katrina Manson

by F. Marina Schauffler

The best new popular science books of February 2026

by Maggie Aderin

by Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland

by Paul Eastwick

by Michael Pollan

by Sarah Alam Malik

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by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne

by Adrian Woolfson

by Joanna Cheek

by Fay Bound-Alberti

by Fred Pearce

by Alev Scott

��by Jo Marchant

Liz Else, Author at ��è��Ƶ