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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All the essential ingredients to kick-start life as we know it have now been found in samples from the asteroid Bennu. This shows that asteroids could have delivered all the prerequisites for life to Earth – and perhaps elsewhere.

In 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission extracted samples from Bennu, an asteroid that was orbiting the sun hundreds of millions of kilometres away, between Mars and Jupiter. The mission returned the samples to Earth in 2023. Since then, small amounts of the 121 grams collected have been sent out to labs across the globe for analysis, so specialists in detecting each type of biological compound could set to work.

The first studies revealed the presence of water, carbon and several organic molecules. Next came the detection of , as well as phosphates. However, this isn’t quite enough to put together the molecules that carry genetic information. The rungs of the ladder of RNA and DNA contain a sugar, which is ribose in RNA and deoxyribose in DNA – and that was missing from the first analyses of the Bennu material.

Now, at Tohoku University in Japan and his colleagues have crushed a small share of the sample and mixed it with acid and water. Then they used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to separate and identify the components in the mix.

This revealed the presence of ribose, as well as other sugars, including lyxose, xylose, arabinose, glucose and galactose – but not deoxyribose.

“This is a new finding of sugars in extraterrestrial materials,” says Furukawa, who adds that almost all life relies on glucose in its metabolism.

“This is such a brilliant result from the OSIRIS-REx mission,” says at the Natural History Museum in London, who wasn’t part of the team, but who . “The one missing ingredient was the sugar, which has now been reported, so now all of the ingredients of RNA are known to be in primitive asteroids.”

Furukawa and his colleagues believe that the sugars formed from brines containing formaldehyde in the parent asteroid from which Bennu came, which is thought to have carried more fluid and featured more reactions.

“Earlier this year, we reported finding salts in the returned sample, and suggested there would have been briny pools of water on Bennu’s parent body,” says Russell. “Such environments would have perfect places to cook up the complex organics that we see in Bennu.”

There is evidence for brines on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Ceres, which suggests that the ingredients for life may be abundant in the solar system, says Russell.

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Furukawa’s work has found on Earth, but he says there was always a worry that these compounds could have made their way into the rock as a result of contamination once they reached Earth. “This finding in the Bennu sample guarantees that these results were true,” he says.

The new work shows that asteroids really could have delivered all the ingredients necessary for life to Earth or to other bodies in the solar system, like Mars, says Furukawa. It also supports the RNA world hypothesis for the origin of life because ribose was found, but deoxyribose wasn’t.

This idea proposes that the earliest life on Earth, long before the advent of cells or DNA-based life, consisted of RNA molecules that contained genetic information and could replicate.

Ecosystems fed by chemicals from tectonic plate collisions have been found more than 9500 metres beneath the surface of the north-west Pacific Ocean.

“Their resilience and beauty left me in awe,” says at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Sanya. “Blood-red tentacles unfurling like delicate flowers in the trench, a stunning defiance of the harsh, crushing darkness.”

Du and her colleagues completed 24 dives in a crewed submersible between 8 July and 17 August 2024, exploring 2500 kilometres of the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench and western parts of the Aleutian Trench, at depths ranging from 5800 to 9533 metres. The hadal zone, a near-freezing area more than 6000 metres deep, is devoid of light and has crushing pressure.

The life there is called the hadal biosphere. It survives by either harvesting energy from nutrients that descend from the surface, which were created via photosynthesis, or by chemosynthesis, where chemicals are the energy source.

Taxonomic and genetic data gathered during the dives revealed that a lot of life in the hadal zone uses compounds such as hydrogen sulphide and methane that are released as fluids and gases, seeping from the fault lines created when tectonic plates slide beneath each other.

“We discovered thriving chemosynthesis-based communities at an astonishing depth of 9533 metres,” says Du. These were found in 19 of the dives, demonstrating how widespread they are.

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The chemosynthetic communities were dominated by bivalve molluscs and marine tube worms called siboglinid polychaetes. Some consisted of thousands of individual animals, stretching for kilometres.

A key characteristic of many of these creatures is that they rely on chemical energy, rather than solar, says Du. “While other life, such as sea cucumbers and amphipods et cetera, inhabit even greater depths, they are not capable of utilising chemicals like hydrogen sulphide to produce energy for survival, but have to rely on organic matter.”

The discoveries represent the “deepest and the most extensive chemosynthetic communities known to exist on our planet”, says Du.