(UK: Channel 4; US: not available)

In 2015, an amateur trophy hunter from the US shot and killed the largest lion in Africa. The vitriol unleashed after Cecil’s death isn’t surprising (or entirely unwarranted), but what is remarkable is how this delicately-crafted film uses the case as a locus for all sorts of arguments about conservation. A symbol in life and in death, Cecil and other large, charismatic animals exist in a complex balance with humans who, one way or another, invariably stake a claim on them.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: not currently available)

Almost everyone in the world now needs to have some knowledge of how AI technologies work, from all the chatbots they encounter to driverless cars and more. Mathematician Hannah Fry is an excellent person to impart such knowledge: across three episodes, she guides us through recent cases where AI has become entangled with very human problems. The series breaks down complicated topics through clear metaphors, and it benefits from Fry’s warmth, humour and complete lack of judgement towards those at the sharp end of this ultimate technological revolution.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: Discovery+)

While we eagerly await Artemis III in 2027, why not revisit this year’s Artemis II mission, which returned humans on a flyby of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years? This all-too-brief film is the product of three and a half years of filming with the Artemis programme, and it’s the story of countless humans – all those behind-the-scenes engineers and designers who worked on the mission alongside the four astronauts who travelled further from Earth than anyone before them.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: PBS)

The best of the many, many documentaries released to celebrate David Attenborough’s centenary was this behind-the-scenes look at the most iconic natural history series ever made. Released in 1979, the structure and tone of Life on Earth became the blueprint for almost every nature documentary that has been made ever since, and consequently has helped to define how we view the world around us. Making Life on Earth is crammed full of fascinating details from the production process, from a terrifying near-miss with armed guards in Rwanda, to Attenborough discovering that he has an allergy to donkey fur while riding the animals to the bottom of the Grand Canyon – and how it ended up ruining a close-up.

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(UK: for rent; US: HBO Max)

Fifteen years ago, a devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed 20,000 people across northern Japan and caused vital cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant to fail. Told through the most stomach-churning footage and eye-witness accounts, this film sets out exactly what went wrong and charts how a natural disaster turned into a nuclear emergency. Amid the grim details, one bright spot is the bravery of the so-called Fukushima 50, who remained onsite and risked their lives to prevent a full-scale meltdown that would have rendered vast swathes of Japan uninhabitable. Because of their actions, only one person has so far died as a result of the accident.

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Physics of defecation

��è����Ƶ editor Alexandra Thompson passes along a press release from the University of Amsterdam entitled “Hoe de poep-emoji zijn vorm kreeg“. A hasty bit of translation reveals that this means “How the poop emoji got its shape”.

For those whose knowledge of emoji doesn’t extend beyond the smiley face, a spot of explanation may be in order. Buried in the emoji alphabet is the poop emoji, which, though it can take many guises IRL, is shaped like a sort of conical tower made up of coiled ropes of faeces. The Emojipedia website helpfully compares it to “soft-serve ice cream”, which, in these heatwave-addled times, is a frankly monstrous image to put into people’s minds.

Readers who saw the 2017 cinematic triumph The Emoji Movie may recall that the poop emoji was a significant supporting character, its voice provided by none other than Shakespearean starship captain Patrick Stewart. We therefore encourage you to imagine that the rest of this item is being read by Stewart in his most stentorian tones.

The press release directed us to a of the physics of lugworm poop, published in Nature Communications in April. The authors explain that many animals produce coiled poop, as illustrated by the emoji, including earthworms and some mammals. This shape emerges from “the coiling of fluid ‘ropes’ falling onto a rigid surface”, which is controlled by a combination of gravity, inertia and viscosity.

Lugworms are an interesting exception, because they defecate upwards, against gravity. They live in U-shaped burrows in intertidal sand flats. At low tide, each lugworm positions its anus just below the burrow entrance and poops upwards, leaving a deposit on the surface of the sand flat.

Yet despite defecating in the opposite direction to most animals, the lugworms still manage to produce a coiled poop. Somehow, this manages to hold its shape despite the risk of “buckling instabilities”. Resistance, at least to buckling instabilities, is apparently not futile.

Furthermore, the radius of the coil is “determined solely by material properties and rope geometry”, unlike in animals that defecate downwards, where the height of the fall is a key factor.

The researchers go on to describe this in great mathematical detail, and to show that the same model can accurately describe the coiling of other substances, such as rice noodles and spaghetti. There is something oddly beautiful about all this: it turns out the universe isn’t so badly designed.

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A qeux for Bayeux

Queueing, and how to optimise it for maximum fairness and efficiency, is an intriguing little area of applied maths. If one train is late arriving at a station, should it be prioritised – perhaps causing a delay to another train – or made to wait? What would be fairest to the people on the trains, and the most efficient way to run the railway system?

Feedback has no idea, but we do know that history buff and chief subeditor Kelsey Hayes had a trying experience of online queueing courtesy of the British Museum. Kelsey is a paying member of the museum, so she got an email in early June notifying her that it would be showing the Bayeux tapestry from September: the first time it has been in the UK for 900 years. Members would get access to an early ticket sale, two weeks before tickets were made available to the general public.

The email advised Kelsey “to register to book” a slot. Or, as she put it, “it’s a sign-up to do a sign-up”. She booted it up, only to discover an online queue that was “over 1400 people deep and takes 20 minutes to get through”.

Once she had gone through the process, Kelsey learned it was an exercise in what she called “getting members to have their log-in details in order, so that there isn’t a register/reset password apocalypse in a couple of weeks”. Never before has Kelsey, or anyone Feedback knows, been asked to sit in a virtual queue for 20 minutes in order to reset a password.

Two weeks later, member booking finally opened. “Took me 4 hours in the queue to get a time slot,” Kelsey reports. She’s going to be so mad when she finds out it wasn’t made in Bayeux and isn’t even a tapestry.

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Not my bag

Feedback always enjoys laughing at hubris, so it gives us considerable pleasure to deliver the news that a bag made of a trademarked substance called “T-Rex Leather” at a Paris auction in June. The bag was expected to go for more than $500,000, but in the end the bids never even approached that.

It was apparently created using from a Tyrannosaurus rex femur, and Feedback is going to stop you right there. Leather is made from skin, and this “T-Rex Leather” isn’t made from T. rex skin.

Collagen is just one of many proteins and other biomolecules found in skin. To recreate T. rex skin properly, you would need a full T. rex genome in order to grow T. rex skin cells. Good luck with that: the oldest known preserved DNA is from a site in Greenland and is 2 million years old, while T. rex went extinct perhaps 66 million years ago.

We don’t have any T. rex DNA, let alone a full genome, so we can’t grow T. rex skin cells. Feedback would like to think this is why the bag didn’t sell, but we fear it might just be because it’s a distinctly unfashionable colour.

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Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

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 17 best popular science books of 2026 so far

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.

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.”

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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.

��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 best new popular science books of June 2026

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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Down under

Places to go

Feeling tense

When I decided to write a space opera, I wanted to start with a supernova. There is no force in the universe like it, either in scale or destructive power – but though it is irrefutably dramatic, it’s also something you can see coming. As a writer, I find this fascinating. What does it mean to look into the heavens and know the exact date when a star will die and with it, your world? What choices do you make, and what price would you pay to save yourself – or your civilisation?

This is the story of Slow Gods.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you are one of these astronomers, watching the stars that will soon destroy your world. For millennia, you’ve known the supernova is coming, and for millennia your people have ignored it. It’s a difficult sell: “Let’s fundamentally transform our entire society to save the lives of billions of people… in about 500 years’ time.” Everyone agrees in a “rhubarb-rhubarb” sort of way that fine, yes, this is a good idea. For someone else. Later.

Well shucks. Suddenly millennia became centuries, became decades. Time is running out. Perhaps you are looking at your newborn grandchild when you realise: you know how, and when, this babe will die. Perhaps they suffocate as the oceans boil, burn alive as the atmosphere ignites or simply die from radiation sickness, skin and organs slowly liquefying. All the incremental changes you made down the years – a distant colony here, a bit of a space elevator there? Not enough. It’s time for your entire civilisation to re-tool around the grim but inescapable premise of saving what you can in the time that remains.

Deep-space sci-fi novel is delightful, profound and not to be missed

A planet is about to be destroyed by the collapse of a binary star system in Slow Gods, Claire North’s first venture into classic science fiction. Read it! says Emily H. Wilson

Some hasty maths ensues. You’ve got a century to rescue a population of 5 billion before your planet burns. You build space elevators and vast motherships to carry people across the stars, and at the height of the project can evacuate almost 50 million people a year. (You are going to ignore the perpetual danger of the things lurking in the monstrous dark, infesting the crew with madness, playing tricks with biology or simply gobbling a ship whole. Such creatures defy computation, after all.)

In 100 years you can maybe, in a pinch, get everyone off-planet – but of course it’s never that simple.�� Children are still being born, the population renewing itself faster than you can evacuate. Perhaps you try to limit population growth? But no – a childless century is as sure a death for your civilisation as fire itself. Life must continue, even if you know that for every child saved, another will die when the planet burns.

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Perhaps you are selective about who’s evacuated, and in what order. Do you prioritise the educated, the most fertile, the famous? And by implication, are you going to leave the disabled, the vulnerable, the marginalised behind? This is a genocide by omission, civilisational eugenics – is that who you are?

Fine – a lottery system. At least people can agree it’s fairer, even if no one wants to accept their own powerlessness. You hope and hope that your number will be called, but as the years tick by, that hope begins to slip away. Your people expect you to die quietly, all because of a simple bit of bad luck. Do you?

Even if you escape, where do you go? Some worlds straight up reject your people, leaving millions stranded in the endless dark. Others are more willing to accept you, but only a few hundred thousand at a time, shoved into the most desolate corners of an unwelcoming planet that your biology simply isn’t adapted to. Your people are being scattered into tiny enclaves across the stars, cut off from each other, forgetting their own customs, languages, ideas. You have saved lives, certainly – but you haven’t saved your civilisation. Historians leap into action, bickering over what songs and stories are most quintessentially you. You watch as your society is put into a museum, history sold to the highest bidder, and know that whatever is displayed is only a fraction of who you are.

Or maybe you don’t. This is after all just one story in the galaxy of Slow Gods.

Maybe instead you downplayed the crisis and said “someone else will sort it out”, as if anyone can out-bluff a supernova, and now you’ve got less than a decade before your seas boil, and there are billions of people with nothing to do except die. The richest and most powerful have saved themselves, but they still need income, and for that they need people. Desperate, terrified people who will do anything to survive.

You eye up your gunships. You eye up other worlds – vulnerable worlds, outside the blast radius. And you maybe make a choice to save your own children, even if that means someone else’s child will die, because what parent will do less? Choosing between guaranteed annihilation or violence without end, perhaps you choose a war that will burn the galaxy, having decided that this is no choice at all.

Claire North’s ��(Orbit) is the July read for the ��è����Ƶ Book Club. Sign up here, and come and discuss the book on our Discord channel .

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