This unusual photograph, shot under ultraviolet light with a 13-second exposure, shows some of the damage caused on land by fishing out at sea.

Gaurav Patil’s image of a fishing net that has been carried by ocean currents and become tangled in a mangrove tree on the shore of Nandgaon village, south of Mumbai, India, has won the overall prize in the 2026 . The competition is organised by US non-profit organisation Mangrove Action Project to raise awareness of the precarious position of the world’s mangrove forests.

Mangroves less than 1 per cent of all tropical forests, but provide crucial habitat for wildlife and store up to 10 times more carbon than the same area of inland forest. Despite better recent news after decades of decline, more than half of mangrove ecosystems are to be at .

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear litter the oceans, carried around the globe by currents and eventually getting caught up or breaking down into microplastics. This gear can severely damage mangrove ecosystems, entangling marine life and choking mangrove trees.

“This photographer has put life into a subject that normally looks dull but is deeply important for conservation. Ghost nets are a real problem,” said judge Dhritiman Mukherjee in an announcement about the prize.

This has to be the strangest August ever, with climate-changed weather making itself felt all over the place. It is also strange because new books are in short supply. That said, the shelves are by no means bare. We have books to recommend to you on everything from octopus ethics and designing the universe to endometriosis and talking to computers. So, whatever you end up doing to refresh and recharge, we’ve got the book for you.

by Daniel Lieberman��

Meaty palaeo? Going veggie or vegan? Eating Mediterranean? Fasting, intermittently or otherwise? Low or high carbs? Enough – before we all lose the plot! Enter Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University who, says his publisher, “tackles this confusion head on with his trademark blend of lively storytelling and myth-busting science”.

As you would expect, Lieberman draws on evolutionary biology, anthropology and physiology to figure out how we are going so wrong. He travels all the way back, moving from what humans evolved to eat through to how fire, farming and industrialisation transformed our diets, and right up to today as we learn how to combine all that history with rigorous medical science. It will be fascinating to see what former New Scientist staffer Chris Simms makes of it in our review, to be published shortly.

by Jonathan Loh

To know where we are headed, it can help to have a reasonable grasp of where we have been. So, will some big-picture thinking from an independent scholar help? Jonathan Loh’s publishers call his book Life Story a “panoramic history of life, revealing the forces that have shaped our world – and could shape it again”. We move through the rise of Homo sapiens, from foragers to farmers, from the Bronze Age to the industrial revolution, through “hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse”.

Humans may dominate the planet, but, as machine intelligence gathers pace, is that supremacy only a phase? Loh is a biologist who has worked as a consultant to organisations such the United Nations Environment Programme and WWF on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, so he should be well placed to build a deep chronicle of the past and lay out his big idea: culture as a form of life. What would that mean in terms of an AI future? We shall see…����

by Xiaochang Li

The idea of talking to machines has been an enduring human fantasy. Divination Engines is a bit of a wild card: author Xiaochang Li, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Stanford University in California, shows her readers how that dream “both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI”. Sneak peaks reveal a book that is no easy read (brace for technical details), but one in which Li manages to explain the origins of what we call natural language processing, as well as the 20^th-century debates between computer scientists, linguists and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology.

She sets out to show how computer speech recognition advanced technology by de-emphasising linguistic meaning in favour of statistical prediction – that is, how researchers gradually abandoned systems that tried to��understand��human language in favour of workarounds that just predicted��patterns in speech and text data. The rest is, as they say, history… and that’s before we even mention search engines, spam filters, content managers and the like. All this comes at the cost of needing more and more new data – forever! This will be a tough read for many of us, but one that’s worth the effort. Oh, and Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI, calls the book “a landmark in the critical history of artificial intelligence”.

by Catherine Heymans

No small ambition in this next book, either. Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans’s latest is, according to its subtitle, no less than a look at the “science of real and virtual worlds”. At its heart is that wonderful, death-defying question: could we be living in a computer simulation, and how would we even know? It all sounds fascinating, as Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland, takes us “on a humorous and mind-bending journey through the science of reality itself”.

From subatomic particles and the cosmic mysteries of dark matter to the secrets of the human senses, we are promised an exploration of “whether humanity could ever create a virtual universe as rich and diverse as our own – and what that means for our sense of self, free will and consciousness”. Not much going on here, then.

by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

This is one for all of us who love silvery-grey snow leopards, those fabulous and elusive beasts, which live in the rugged mountains of central Asia, camouflaged against the rocks and cliffs. For the past 20 years, scientist, conservationist and mountaineer Kulbhushansingh (Kullu) Suryawanshi has studied them in the wild, exploring every aspect of their lives from habitat to prey to population – sometimes living for months in the world’s toughest, most remote environments. Suryawanshi, we are promised, has “pioneered new research that shines fresh light on these charismatic and vulnerable animals, showing how their fate is entangled with the local people and how their survival is central to preserving an austere, delicate ecosystem”.

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by Lani Watson

There is something wonderful about books with a single letter as their main title. Q (and here’s the subtitle so we know what we’re talking about: The hidden power of questions in a world that wants answers) is all about the art and science of asking questions, as the only creature on Earth that does so in any formal sense. But we’re trained to look for answers, not how to ask questions – so much so, says author Lani Watson, that we live in an answer-rich, question-poor world.

Yet, as the publishers remind us,” from doctors’ surgeries to courtrooms to dating, the ability to ask questions determines our experiences. In a world obsessed by answers, asking better questions is powerful.”

That sounds very wise, and we should be in good hands: Watson is a philosopher and honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, as well as a former research fellow at the University of Oxford. Plug into what her publishers call a “captivating narrative from the death of Socrates to the age of AI”, and you will soon learn how to think about the questions you ask and the ones you don’t.

by Richard Schweid

With octopus blooms suddenly appearing in many places, journalist Richard Schweid and publisher University of North Carolina Press could hardly have hit on a more provocative subject. Billed as a “gripping, on-the-ground investigation into the global race to farm octopus and the ethical firestorm it has ignited”, there is clearly a lot to chew on as we explore the “ethics and future of growing the world’s most intelligent invertebrate”.

Among the issues is the fact that, in 2021, the London School of Economics recognised invertebrates such as cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and decapods (crayfish, crabs, lobsters) as capable of experiencing pain, distress and happiness, finding that high-welfare farming of them would therefore be impossible. But the enormous international demand for octopus meat continues to grow, even as wild octopus populations decline. Fishers in the UK’s south-west are already experiencing problems as the vast number of octopuses eat their typical high-value catch: adult lobsters, brown edible crabs, scallops and the like. What to do instead? Eat the octopuses? Apparently, recipes are proliferating… a dilemma indeed.

by Evelyn Scott

This is no less than an exposé of medical misogyny, says the publisher of what looks like a forthright book about endometriosis, A Bloody Scandal: How medicine fails women in pain. There should be a huge market for it, given the sheer number who experience it (it is often said that 1 in 10 women do, but the real figure is probably higher), often in silence and for decades.

Author Evelyn Scott weaves in her own experience of the condition: she was just a teenager when she first had the symptoms of endometriosis. She shares 15 years during which she endured constant, agonising pain – and hopeless ineptitude when seeking support, ranging from dismissals on the grounds of hysteria to misdiagnoses. She felt completely isolated, until she discovered all the other women experiencing the same condition. Powerful stuff and, many will argue, long overdue.

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“Most people are completely unaware of what is in the water,” says Julian Cremona, a naturalist and photographer who is out to change that with his new book.

Plankton is an umbrella term for all kinds of different organisms floating in our waters, from plants, known as phytoplankton, to animals, known as zooplankton. They can be as little as 0.02 micrometres, the size of some viruses, or as big as 2 metres, the size of a large jellyfish. What they have in common is that they aren’t powerful enough to overcome the movement of water, unlike organisms that can resist the current. As Cremona writes, plankton are “drifting organisms that are unable to determine their long-term direction and are at the whims of the current”.

Cremona’s book is a guide to the different types of plankton found along the British coast, such as the larva of a Magelona worm, just 2 millimetres in size, in the main image. To take this photograph, Cremona fitted objective lenses from an old microscope to his camera.

Below is a shot of a tiny zooplankter, Oikopleura. Its body is made up of a trunk on top of a long tail, ranging from a few millimetres to a centimetre long. It has a lifespan of five to six days, over which it grows, reproduces and finally dies.

Some larger plankton are shown below, including a handful of compass jellyfish (Chrysaora hysoscella), which are mostly found in northern Europe. The umbrella of this jellyfish can stretch to 30 centimetres in diameter, and it uses its 24 tentacles to catch its food: small fish, crabs and other jellyfish.

Pictured below is a swarm of moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), the most common jellyfish to be found in the UK’s waters.

Some phytoplankton exhibit symbiosis with jellyfish and sea anemones, such as the aptly named snakelocks anemone (Anemonia viridis), pictured below. Single-celled Symbiodinium plankton live within the tissue of its green tentacles, where they perform photosynthesis and provide their host with carbohydrates. In return, the plankton receive inorganic carbon, nitrogen, phosphate – and a protected refuge in which to live.

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.

New Scientist 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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Togetherness
Rowan Hooper
(, UK, out 4th June; , US, out 18th August)

The best books are those that give you a new perspective, but�� by my colleague Rowan Hooper has given me something more than that – not just a new view, but a new way of seeing. In essence a book about symbiosis, Togetherness zooms from the inner workings of our cells all the way out to how our planet functions as a whole and back in again, revealing how biological cooperation underpins all life – and why Western science has largely failed to notice this for centuries.

Symbiosis is the kind of concept you learn at school, often with a too-neat-to-be-true definition and a few quirky illustrative examples – coral, say, or lichen. Both feature in Togetherness (plus plenty of extraordinary cases you won’t be familiar with), but Rowan makes it abundantly clear that symbiosis isn’t a freak occurrence confined to a few classic cases: it’s a rule of nature, occurring time and time again and everywhere you care to look.

How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun

Having demonstrated this, he then makes his passionate argument for how this revelation requires us to re-examine everything we know about the natural world. He traces our understanding of evolution through history, and how Charles Darwin’s dazzling fundamental insights on competition and survival have an overlooked counterpart in the tendency of unrelated living things to come together. Rowan – as big a fan of Darwin as I’ve ever met – treads the line carefully and shows how you can have both.

In the thrilling final third of the book, Rowan explores all the environmental ills of today, many of which are the result of us neglecting to consider how different species live and work together. He speaks to the scientists trying to figure out how, in turn, we could use symbiosis to right these wrongs.

I’ve worked closely with Rowan, New Scientist’s podcast editor, for over a decade, so I can’t pretend that this is an objective review of his third book. But listeners of our podcast The World, The Universe And Us will know that Rowan is someone who loves to dive into big ideas, and Togetherness manages to be both hugely ambitious in scope and also very enjoyable.

His plea for us all to adopt an ecological world view, one underpinned by the insights of symbiosis, is deeply rooted in his earlier career as a scientist, but Rowan’s many journalistic titbits – from what Karl Marx thought of Darwin to Carl Sagan’s opening chat-up line to Lynn Margulis – make it really fun.

Spirit of Antarctica expedition cruise

Join Rowan Hooper on a journey into one of the most remote and pristine environments on Earth guided by a team of seasoned experts, from naturalists to historians, who will share their knowledge of this extraordinary region.

Read more

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.

Is an old NASA probe about to redraw the frontier of the solar system?

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, now zooming out of the Kuiper belt, has made a discovery that could upend what we know about where the solar system ends

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.