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 Ěý– 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 thereĚý – 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 ofĚýThe 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”.

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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? ĚýWith 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.

Ěýby 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.

żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ 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”).

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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”.

Ěý

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A single dose of the psychedelic drug LSD seems to reduce anxiety without lasting side effects.

“Ours is the first modern trial to look specifically at LSD, or any psychedelic, for generalised anxiety disorder,” says at biotech company MindMed in New York.

The condition is characterised by excessive worry about a broad range of things, such as work and relationships. First-line treatment includes mood-enhancing drugs, like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other antidepressants, and talking therapies.

But to such treatments. “For a lot of people, SSRIs are not very effective, they have intolerable side effects [such as feeling emotionally numb] because people have to take them on a daily basis, and they only work while you’re taking them,” says Karlin.

Previous studies have suggested that LSD may be an alternative. The psychedelic is often used recreationally for its mind-altering, hallucinogenic effects. Karlin says it is thought to act by increasing levels of the mood-boosting chemical serotonin in the brain, which some people say induces a profound emotional experience in them. He adds that it may also enhance the brain’s ability to rewire itself and form new thought patterns.

But until now, no trial comparing people taking LSD with others taking placebo pills has explored whether the substance can benefit those with generalised anxiety disorder.

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To fill this gap, Karlin and his colleagues recruited 198 adults with the condition. The participants slowly tapered off any anxiety medications they had been using, but those who were receiving psychotherapy continued with their sessions.

In a survey commonly used in clinics, the participants then rated the severity of each of 14 symptoms, such as feeling worried, tense or struggling to focus, on a scale of 0 to 4. Out of a maximum total score of 56, the participants scored 30, on average, above the threshold of 24 for severe anxiety.

Next, the team randomly split the participants into five groups that either took LSD – at various doses of 25, 50, 100 or 200 micrograms – or placebo pills, without being told which they were given. A day later, those who had received 100 and 200 microgram doses, but not the other groups, already reported an improvement in symptoms, says Karlin.

A month later, those who had received the 100 and 200 microgram doses experienced an average 21 and 19 point reduction in anxiety, respectively, with the improvement sustained until the end of the study, three months after the dosing day. About 46 per cent of these participants went into remission, which is a score of 7 or below.

Just one dose of psilocybin seems to be enough to rewire the brain

Psilocybin appears to alter brain networks linked to repetitive negative thoughts, which may explain how the drug helps to treat some mental health conditions

Meanwhile, those taking the placebo and the two lower doses saw between a 14 and 17 point reduction in anxiety over the same period, with about 20 per cent going into remission. This suggests the lower doses provided no additional relief beyond the placebo.

The benefit seen by the two highest dose groups is a substantial improvement above the placebo, says at University College London. “That’s a clinically meaningful improvement in terms of impairment and distress,” he says.

The improvement in the placebo group, a phenomenon commonly seen in anxiety trials, probably resulted from a mixture of factors, such as people feeling attended to and cared for as part of the trial, says Kamboj.

The team found that most participants could accurately guess whether they had taken LSD or the placebo. This is common with psychedelics because they have hallucinogenic side effects for many people. In all the groups, some participantsĚýalso experienced nausea and headaches in the 12 hours after treatment.

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Those on lower doses of LSD and on the placebo experienced changes in visual perception like hallucinations at far lower rates than those on the higher doses of the psychedelic. This makes it hard to tell whether the LSD-related benefits were due to a person’s expectations based on the effects they felt or the direct effects of the drug on the brain, says Kamboj.

Despite this caveat, the study provides some of the best evidence to date that LSD could be a useful treatment for anxiety, he says. “It’s a very promising finding that you can get a very rapid effect in symptom reduction, that would be extremely meaningful to patients.”

The results are promising enough that the US Food and Drug Administration has designated MindMed’s LSD formulation as a Breakthrough Therapy, which expedites the process for drug development. Karlin says the team is carrying out larger trials that will track benefits beyond three months, with results expected in the next couple of years.