(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.

��

(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.

��

(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.

��

(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.

��

(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.

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.”

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

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”.

��

When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.

(editor-in-chief Alice Roberts)

�� by Saira Hameed

New Scientist 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

by Darby Saxbe

by Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao

Free newsletter

Sign up to Book Club

Sign up to newsletter

by Leroy Chiao with Victoria Bruce

by Brian Clegg

The best new popular science books of 2026

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

��by Jessica Pykett

by Janet L. Jones

by Louis Lefebvre, translated by Pablo Strauss

by Beeban Kidron

by Michael Handford

Recently, a friend told me over coffee about some disheartening feedback she had received. “They said it was good,” she said, “but that it read like it was written by AI.” Knowing her, I understood immediately what had happened. Her credibility was being questioned not because her work was poor, but because it was too good – too clear, too fluent, too polished.

The rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence tools is changing how we think about good writing. In the digital age, it is increasingly important to signal that an actual person – not a faceless large language model – is behind the words. One paradoxical way of doing this is, surprisingly, to damage the quality of your own writing.

Alan Turing even made such a suggestion in the 1950s: sprinkle in a few deliberate typographical errors to appear more convincingly human. The irony, of course, is that Turing was addressing that advice to machines.

My friend’s experience isn’t an isolated one. Writing well, once a mark of skill, has become, for a growing number of readers, reviewers and hiring managers, a source of moral suspicion. The skills we once used to signal intelligence and effort – clarity, precision, a well-turned sentence – are starting to lose their meaning.

The problem lies in our inability to easily detect AI-written content, making false positives (that is, wrongly accusing someone of using AI tools) a serious concern. have shown that can reliably distinguish between human- and machine-generated writing. When human- and AI-generated writing is intermixed, performance becomes even worse. As a result, that had been using plagiarism-detection tools for AI detection have stopped due to concerns about their reliability.

In this climate of uncertainty, some writers have reached for the only signal still available to them: the aptly named human error. A repeated word, a small grammatical slip, a slightly clunky phrase – these have started to function less as signs of carelessness and more as proof of a genuine human hand. The defect has become the credential.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Weekly

Sign up to newsletter

Errors are already being deployed strategically in competitive contexts – , job applications, professional correspondence. Recruiters have begun advising applicants to leave a single deliberate typo in a cover letter, precisely to signal that an interested human wrote it.

Of course, none of this is stable, and the currency of the error signal is on borrowed time. Once imperfection becomes a recognised sign of authenticity, it immediately becomes available for imitation. Users will ask AI systems to sound rougher, less polished and more human. The systems will comply and soon become adept at performing calibrated incompetence.

The path ahead towards reclaiming authenticity is unclear. Perhaps some situations will demand more direct proof of authorship without the assistance of AI: face-to-face, unmediated assessments, handwritten submissions and real-time explanations. Or, in a world increasingly saturated by AI tools, maybe the decisive skill will simply be knowing how to use them well. Some universities have allowed students to use AI in exams, so long as they submit their prompts as part of the assessment.

What seems certain, however, is that the old traces of authenticity and authorship have become harder to define and locate – and even where they exist, they arrive shadowed by suspicion.