The hall hummed with joyous curiosity at this year’s New Scientist Live at Excel London, which ran from 10 to 12 October and attracted thousands of visitors of all ages.

With topics including the search for extraterrestrial life, what AI is teaching us about consciousness and the maths behind Pokémon, there was a delightful range to explore. Highlights included physicist Jim Al-Khalili diving into the deepest mysteries of time and psychologist Kimberley Wilson on how to build lifelong brain health. Other packed talks ranged from how we evolved, from anthropologist Alice Roberts, to a myth-busting take on supplements by doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken.

Fans lined up to meet speakers, including naturalist Chris Packham, who shared moving thoughts on why science is crucial to tackling the climate crisis. Younger fans flocked for selfies with mathematician and YouTuber Tom Crawford, who fought a fierce maths battle with maths teacher and TV presenter Bobby Seagull.

On the show floor, people could journey through a giant inflatable gut, 3D-print organs and get hands-on with large insects. They also lined up to board a Chinook helicopter, or step into a hospital of the future. Plus, in virtual reality, they could swim through coral reefs and explore the body in 3D.

Visitors also saw New Scientist staff, including editor Catherine de Lange, predict the biggest scientific breakthroughs in the next 70 years. Plus, podcast editor Rowan Hooper hosted an emergency briefing on the climate crisis, joined by leading climate and biodiversity scientists.

The talks were all recorded and will be available to stream online for 12 months. See for details of how to get access.

Big issues abound in this month’s books, as we batten down the hatches against El Niño and the known unknowns out there. Luckily, here in our snug bunker, we have plenty of other things to think about. There’s the source of the next big conflict (it’s probably not what you think), how to eat healthily (as close to definitive as you’re going to get), and fighting talk from inside the rush to develop AI. There’s also the real story of pregnancy loss, giving animals their rightful place, the nature of family, saving childhood, and why humans ask questions. Oh, and there are some silly sums and extraordinary fantasy botanicals for those who fancy a spot of fun. Lovely.     

by Kevin Roose

Just in case you’ve been living in an off-the-grid shack next to a beautiful lake for the past few years, The AGI Chronicles looks like an essential re-entry book before returning to, er, civilisation. The clue’s all over the subtitle, “The inside story of the race to create an artificial superintelligence”, and author Kevin Roose is tech columnist for The New York Times, so he ought to know – a lot. New Scientist will be reviewing it soon in depth, but meanwhile, this zeroes in on the past decade’s efforts by a few companies fighting to build the “most powerful technology in history… artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything”. Expect a fat volume (an alarming 448 pages, says the book’s website), based on “more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos”. It will be fascinating to see what our reviewer makes of the book. Just don’t drop it on your foot, OK?

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by Tom Crawford

There’s a small band of mathematicians (think Matt Parker, Alex Bellos, Hannah Fry and Eugenia Cheng) who somehow manage to make a tough subject engaging, exciting or, whisper it, even funny. Tom Crawford’s title is certainly enough to raise a guffaw in the hardest of hearts, let alone Pokémon fans. Now try asking, as the publisher does, how many daily calories you would need to feed a Charizard. Could the Death Star’s laser actually blow up a planet? What is the half-life of the Incredible Hulk? And is the meaning of life really “42”? OK, we know the answer to the last question, but it does sound like Crawford is pulling out all the stops to use his Oxford fellow smarts on the fantasy maths of fictional, often wild, universes. Parting shot: just how would you work out Frodo Baggins’s life insurance premium for the journey to Mordor?

Primatologist Frans de Waal, who died in 2024, left a huge legacy for other scholars and campaigners fighting ideas of human exceptionalism and arguing that animals have complex inner lives. Minds I’ve Met is one of two books by de Waal posthumously published this year; the other is , a selection of photographs taken during his work over 30 years, showing, say the publishers, “the rich social life” of the primates he studied. Both books sport the provocative and sometimes moving titles de Waal used to challenge the status quo (think , Mama’s Last Hug, or ). In Minds, the kicker is also in the subtitle: “From denying to embracing the inner lives of animals”. The publishers say his “pioneering work… contributed to a new image of animals as intentional agents with minds of their own, capable of remarkable cognitive feats, demonstrating empathy and self-awareness, showing emotions and conscious”. He often wrote for and talked to New Scientist. If he’s new to you, you could do worse than starting here.

by Paris Marx

Forget, for a moment, grappling with AI conceptually and think about it as an environmental issue. All over the world, the data centres already built and those planned are crucial to the current AI successes and to the ambitions of the companies involved. What’s more, say the publishers of a polemical book called Hyperscale, the centres use up resources such as water and power at “dangerously unsustainable levels”. This book’s author is Paris Marx, a tech critic, journalist and host of the Tech Won’t Save You podcast. It sounds like a wild ride, with the publishers saying the “tech overlords are waging a resource war as they trade our future for their profit”. It is nothing less than a “civilisational time bomb in the making”, where tough reporting shows that “the greatest threat is not the spectre of AI, but a global disaster that has already begun”. The book is already longlisted for this year’s .

by Christopher Gardner

The sheer amount of advice on what to eat to be healthy is unnerving, especially since a lot of it is quite probably junk. But before you reach for a doughnut out of sheer despair, there are books out there that offer sane ways through the morass, with excellent science and tasty-sounding recipes. Food Sense is by Christopher Gardner, who’s been researching nutrition and health for decades, and is now the director of nutrition studies and a professor of medicine at Stanford University in California. His publishers promise that he “shows you where there is genuine scientific consensus so you can discern fact from fads and ignore the health food marketing hype. From weight loss to protein, ultra-processed foods, seed oils, GMO’s and fermented foods, this definitive and myth-busting guide answers all your nutrition questions”. Now there’s a big claim or two. Luckily, former New Scientist staffer (and all-round nutrition, health and longevity specialist writer) Graham Lawton is on hand to review the book later this month so we’ll find out how well they all stack up  – that, and how good the recipes are.

by Tania Lombrozo

Why are the clouds white? What made that artwork so special? Where does the cat vanish to at night? Who am I? From the existential to the trivial, questioning – curiosity and the seemingly endless desire for answers – feels hardwired in us. So, is it? And does it connect evolutionarily to the human way of learning? Could it even be that elusive thing that makes humans, human? Certainly, the subtitle of Tania Lombrozo’s new book –  “The science of explanation and the human drive to understand” – tells us where she thinks we are. She is a professor of psychology at Princeton University, and her research, say her publishers, is all about turning our explanation seeking back on itself by asking, ”What does explanation do for us? And, most important, how can we do it better?” The idea that some explanations are more satisfying than others also sounds intriguing.

by Cherry Casey

Have childcare and education in the UK been turned into a business – and if so, who is profiting? Certainly not the children, argues Cherry Casey, a journalist specialising in children’s rights. Her book comes billed as an “exposé of how chasing profits and league tables has come at the cost of developing well rounded, happy people”. As ever, the book’s subtitle positions her quest: “How we turned children into data and why we need to stop”. It’s an interesting argument, given the rise of mental illness even in young children and the overall datafication of our world, and the use (or overuse) of testing and “zero-tolerance” behaviour policies many schools advertise as a desirable end. So, who is profiting, and how do we turn the ship round?

by Kate Clancy

This looks to be a moving but probably also essential book, dealing with the realities of one of life’s most important but common events: the loss of a pregnancy. The author is Kate Clancy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she’s based in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology. This is likely to give her book the kind of heft it needs to challenge the myths surrounding pregnancy loss. According to its publisher, Clancy “makes an impassioned, fact-based case for truthfulness and care at a time when inaccurate images of fetuses abound, electronic impulses continue to pass for a heartbeat, and reproductive autonomy is criminalized”.

by Elisabeth Braw

Where the next war will come from is a question that keeps many of us awake at night – not to mention political analysts and defence chiefs fully occupied. One place you would be unlikely to guess is the bottom of the sea. But that is where an extraordinary-sounding book is set. A quick peek confirms that the book looks to deliver on its publisher’s description as a “gripping account of the hidden battles beneath the world’s oceans, where cables and pipelines – the lifelines of the modern world – are under constant threat from states, corporations, and hackers”. And remember, the stakes could hardly be higher at a time when so much global traffic – internet, energy, telecoms – runs through cables that are out of sight. Braw is a force to reckon with: she’s a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where she leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order initiative. She was previously a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and is also a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission.

by Alison Flood, illustrated by Emma Tudor-Bloch

Here’s some fun – a chance to join New Scientist’s own Alison Flood (sidenote: this is included here without any pressure or suggestion from her…) on a strange voyage into the fictional botanical worlds created by authors drawn from the ranks of science fiction and fantasy. Published in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, it comes with over 100 beautiful (if occasionally scary) illustrations by artist Emma Tudor-Bloch, vividly bringing to life all manner of unreal plants and fungi. And for those seeking a bit of heft, there’s expert text and historical images from Kew’s experts, exploring the real-life plants and fungi that inspired the fantasy. So, watch out for a host worlds including nightlock (The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins), weirwood trees (A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin), Ents (The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien), redweed (The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells), wheel trees (The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman) and the Cordyceps fungus (The Last of Us).

by Meredith Small

Mother. Father. Son. Daughter. Grandmother… Most of us grow up in a family of some sort, no matter how dysfunctional. But Family: How the human need for belonging shapes our lives by Meredith Small is no self-help book. Small is a well-known anthropologist at Cornell University in New York state, and the author of Our Babies, Ourselves. Here, say her publishers, she sets out to examine the roots of the family and why this type of connection is the bedrock of human interaction in all cultures – and how getting to grips with its nature might help us “navigate our rapidly changing world”. Given the sometimes overemphasis on the family and “family values” globally, some might argue we should join Small as she asks why we form families and place such importance on family relationships, and whether family life does deliver – throughout our different stages and ages. As you would expect from an anthropologist, Small’s time frame spans millions of years and her scope is global – all human life and setup is here, promises the publisher. From a peek, it looks like family is as varied as the human experience. Lots of room for manoeuvre, thankfully.

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Vegetarian and vegan dog foods just need a few tweaks to make them nutritionally complete diets.

Analyses reveal that meat-free dry kibbles meet dogs’ protein and fat requirements, lacking only sufficient iodine and B vitamins. With supplements or – better yet – improved commercial preparation, plant-based dog food could keep the animals healthy while reducing the environmental impact of the pet food industry, says at the University of Nottingham, UK.

“As long as they’re getting all of the essential nutrients from those ingredients, then the dogs are going to thrive,” she says.

Many vegans and vegetarians who own dogs struggle with the ethics of feeding meat to their omnivore pets, says , also at the University of Nottingham. Responding to that concern, pet food manufacturers have started offering plant-based foods to consumers.

Government organisations like the European Pet Food Industry Federation and the Association of American Feed Control Officials require standardised testing of commercial pet foods and additives to ensure they meet nutritional standards. Even so, most pet foods worldwide do not go through robust nutritional testing by independent research teams, says Gardner.

Brociek, Gardner and their colleagues analysed 25 commercial dry foods for healthy adult dogs – 19 containing meat and six based exclusively on plants. Among the latter, two were labelled as vegetarian and four were vegan.

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None of the foods met all the official nutritional guidelines for dogs, despite being packaged as nutritionally complete, the researchers say. Even so, all the foods had acceptable concentrations of protein, fatty acids and essential amino acids.

Most – including five of the six plant-based foods – didn’t have enough iodine, but seaweed could easily make up for that deficiency.

Vitamins in general were sufficient across the board, except for vitamin B, which came up particularly short in plant-based foods. Dogs low in vitamin B can have issues with their skin, nerves and digestive systems, so manufacturers should supplement those foods, the researchers say.

The findings point to oversights in all kinds of dog food manufacturing, not just those based on plants, says at Murdoch University in Australia. “Consumers are expecting that if products are labelled as being nutritionally sound, and that will be true, but clearly it’s not true,” he says.

“I believe a vegetarian diet can be adequate if carefully supplemented with nutrients lacking in plants – as is the case for humans who choose a vegetarian diet,” says at the University of Pisa in Italy. Owners should avoid making their own plant-based foods for their pets, she adds.

Pet dogs have evolved to be able to eat a wide variety of foods, so feeding them well-balanced, plant-based meals can satisfy their nutritional needs while avoiding the , like greenhouse gas emissions, says Gardner.

“They’re true omnivores,” he says. “As most Labrador owners – myself included – will tell you, they’ll eat anything.”