As seasonal storms take many of us by surprise, it’s time to head for the certainty of indoors, and a decent book (or two). We have some really intriguing titles this month, including a profoundly odd-sounding book by a forest that shares author rights with humans, and some terrifying night terrors that may teach us a lot about our brains. Oh, and if you want to stop trying to control everything around you, try surrendering to a higher power – of your choice, naturally.

by Anna Lembke

In a complex world, the pressure to control your life is immense: from removing annoying noises around you to slavishly avoiding missing out on living your best life, to keeping your relationship, children and health on track in every way imaginable. It’s overwhelming. Surely we can’t keep it up? According to Anna Lembke’s new book, Radical Surrender: Letting go in a world addicted to change, there is a way out. The word ”addicted” in the subtitle offers a clue here: this is the author of the bestselling book Dopamine Nation, in which she looked at pleasure and pain – and the critical task of finding a delicate balance between them, especially in an age of unprecedented high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli, mostly delivered digitally.

In this new book, we are promised tools to help us let go of our desire for control, but we have to follow Lembke’s advice and acknowledge a “power greater than ourselves, however we define it, and give our will over to that power: less mastery and more a return to mystery”. As an addiction medicine psychiatrist and head of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic in California, this “radical surrender” should be scientifically argued. Watch out for our review on 5 November.

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by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend

Let’s face it: our every move, from our next Google search to our latest Netflix selection, is utterly dependent on numbers, and AI is now an everyday reality. We have no choice but to face up to the overwhelming presence of mathematics, small, medium – or big. In Big Math: The hidden codes that run our world, Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend (both leading mathematicians at Cornell University, New York) set out to show how relatively familiar concepts such as matrices, vectors, Markov chains, linear algebra and the like lie at the heart of computer science and quantum computing – essential for us all to know, say its publishers, if we’re to “comprehend the changes sweeping the world”.

The best new popular science books of September 2026

Dive into new titles from major names including Carlo Rovelli, Maggie Aderin, Xand van Tulleken and Jim Al-Khalili, as well as a new biography of Stephen Hawking

by Amy Crawford

For some while now, we’ve known that the story of invasive species is complex, but just how complex is the stuff of Amy Crawford’s Undesirable: Invasive species, humans, and where we all belong. Blundering all over the world, we have accidentally (as well as deliberately) carried species with us on our adventures – and often created great incidental damage to the recipient environments, ranging from destroyed habitats to changes in the climate. Then there is the accidental introduction of blow-in species over relatively short stretches of water, or those dropped by migrating birds. After hundreds of years, it’s still not entirely clear where the gains or losses to local biodiversity really land.

“Whether it’s garlic mustard spreading through American forests or brushtail possums allegedly decimating the flightless birds of New Zealand,” Undesirable is a “multi-faceted story”, say its publishers. On top of that, exactly how to hold ourselves to account remains an open question. And apparently, the young field of “invasion biology” has been “wracked by controversy and haunted by ethical quandaries as it has sought to destroy some species for the benefit of others”. Crawford, a freelance writer and long-time contributor to Smithsonian magazine, looks set to give us plenty to chew on here.

by Robert Macfarlane, Cosmo Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Los Cedros Cloud Forest. Illustrated by Paula Terán Ospina

Look closely at the list of creators on the cover of this book, aimed at a 5+ age group, about a cloud forest within the Intac valley in northwestern Ecuador, and along with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and other experts, you’ll spot a more unusual contributor: Los Cedros Cloud Forest itself. As the publishers (probably correctly) point out, this is the first time a forest has been included in the creation of a book. To celebrate that fact – and the anniversary of a court decision recognising Los Cedros’s right to exist and flourish in the future – this is apparently “more than a book”, in that by making it, “we are recognising the forest’s moral rights as the co-creator of a literary work”. When you open Song of the Cedars, the flora, fauna and fungi of Los Cedros Cloud Forest jump off the page in a panoramic scene, which can be read or displayed as you wish. All the royalties from sales of the book, the publishers say, will be used to support the protection of Los Cedros. Fighting talk!

by Angèle Christin

What’s it like to make your money as a content creator? Angèle Christin, a digital studies scholar at Stanford University, California, takes us inside that world in her new book. The things these influencers post on social media range “from dance routines to political commentary, makeup tutorials to carpentry DIY”. She looks far and wide to explore what she calls their “golden dreams of passion, autonomy, and monetary returns”. No spoiler alert needed: the outcome for these creators and their followers shows how this digital work tends to fuel precarity, inequality – and much more. Christin’s bottom line: it’s more than time to rethink the economic structure of social media.

by Ashley Ward

Ocean water is nearly four times saltier than human blood, yet it has been central to our evolution – the  “amniotic fluid of life itself”, as the publishers of Saltwater: A natural history of the sea describe it. In this book, author Ashley Ward, a marine biologist, will bring readers face to face with the deep secrets of marine life. There will be jousting rival humpback whales, and claustrophobic journeys in a submersible to 600 metres deep to see an aurora of bioluminescence. We will also apparently encounter the complex seabird cities that develop along coasts, where auk fathers train their chicks to become skilful divers. And there’s mention of the ethereal song of a pod of belugas carrying across a fjord in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. Ward could hardly be better placed to deliver all this and more, given his background as a biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and as head of its Animal Behaviour Lab.

by Baland Jalal

A sneak peek at the introduction of Baland Jalal’s The Phantom Mind: Insights from the borderlands of sleep shows what we can expect from a researcher often billed as the leading expert in sleep paralysis. “One morning in my teenage years, I awoke gripped by terror… In horror, I realized a demon was on my bed. It grabbed my legs and began tossing them up and down in the air, while crushing my chest and squeezing my neck. While being strangled to death, I could somehow telepathically read the mind of the monster. It had one – and only one agenda: to destroy me.”

This terrifying no man’s land between REM sleep and wakefulness became the territory of his research for the next decade or so. There are plenty more great stories in this highly accessible book, including one featuring Jalal’s mentor, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who appears as a sleep-paralysis ghost to Jalal – and leads him off on a new train of thought about exactly how the ghostly figures people see in sleep paralysis are formed. The borderlands of sleep turn out to be a rich seam to mine for those hoping to discover more about the waking mind. And watch out for our interview with Jalal, in our 14 November issue.

by Erica McAlister, illustrated by Natalie McIntyre

This is the latest in the Chicago University Press’s Day series. Earlier in the year, we enjoyed marine biologist Helen Scales’s Shell Day and behavioural ecologist Marty Crump’s Snake Day. Insect Day: A story of 24 hours and 24 hexapod lives follows the same pattern, acting as an hourly guide, this time following insects as they hunt for food, mates or just plain safety from predators. Author Erica McAlister is a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who studies flies. She starts at midnight in Africa with a female mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, which is out for the blood of any unwitting sleeper and may unintentionally transfer malaria. Who knew, by the way, that the males have no taste for blood?

By 7am, we’ve moved on to the Arctic circle, where a queen of Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee, is basking within the flowers of the Arctic poppy. She can also keep warm simply by vibrating. Throughout the day, we meet the yellow-legged saddle casemaker (Agapetus ochripes), the blue-winged helicopter (Megaloprepus caerulatus), the Peruvian shield mantis (Choeradodis rhombicollis), the ferocious water bug (Abedus herberti) and Grote’s bertholdia (Bertholdia trigona). In its closing pages, Insect Day delivers a final punch: we’ve just toured insects, but there may be as many as 30 million more yet to describe.

by Richard Dawkins

A new Richard Dawkins book is always a bit of a treat, and 42 Tales from Life: A modern bestiary looks set to be no exception. This is a collection of animal tales, explaining how they evolved into the extraordinary, intriguing and often beautiful forms they have, with a colourful backdrop of illustrations by 19^th-century naturalist, morphologist and artist Ernst Haeckel. According to the publisher, Dawkins reveals “the fundamental truths behind even the most unfathomable animal behaviours”, such as the galloping of fish, the shape of the rhinoceros’ horn, the surprising similarities between horses and lizards, and why hummingbirds glow so brilliantly. The book starts with “The Cephalopod’s Tale” and “The Hummingbird’s Tale”, ending with “The Bat’s Tale” and “The Frog’s Tale”. They are accompanied by Haeckel’s art, whose depictions of plants, sea creatures and other animals turn out to have fascinated Dawkins all his life.

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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.

“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.

HOW could we talk about David Attenborough’s best documentaries without featuring the photo perhaps most associated with the broadcaster, whose 100th birthday is on 8 May?

Life on Earth, the groundbreaking 1979 series containing that iconic gorilla sequence, pictured above, introduced a wider audience to the calm narration and stunning nature shots for which Attenborough is known today. His many documentaries would go on to move from the ocean depths to the lives of plants, and from the distant past to the fight against climate change.

Read on to discover which made the biggest impact on our staff, and which they deem worth watching today.

(1979)

Life on Earth is special to me for so many reasons. There is that famous encounter with gorillas. It was also the first ambitious nature series of its kind – without its success, we might never have had the many great series that followed it. Then there’s the brilliant way Attenborough tells the story of deep time as he descends the Grand Canyon, and then back up again. There’s probably as much science here as in the rest of his programmes put together – I don’t think I’ve seen a better TV series on the evolution of life. OK, from today’s perspective it is a bit lectury at times, but who would you rather be lectured by?

Last but not least, for me, it has personal meaning, as I’m sure it does for many other people who saw it in their youth and were influenced by it. That wonky opening music by Edward Williams is just so evocative.

Michael Le Page, reporter

(1995)

Plants live on another plane of existence. Every morning, drooping wood anemones lift their heads and nod at the sun, while brambles grapple across the forest floor with slow aggression. Exploding pods launch seeds in a millisecond; on mountain tops, bristlecone pines gnarl into stumps over thousands of years.

Time-lapse and high-speed photography weren’t new when The Private Life of Plants was filmed, but this was the first series to use them at scale. They allowed Attenborough to explore the agency and the intelligence of flora like never before.

When I rewatch the series today, the lurid colour grade, bespoke plant-themed typeface and rudimentary CGI bring me as much joy as the plants’ private lives. I would also recommend the behind-the-scenes for the plants of Life, which lays bare the painstaking ingenuity of the film-makers who capture these other worlds.

Thomas Lewton, features editor

(2001)

As the first in-depth look at what is happening beneath the rarely explored waves, The Blue Planet astounded me when I first watched it. New species were discovered and extraordinary footage showed blue whales from the air, alien-looking creatures in the ocean depths and, most surprisingly, herring sperm as far as the eye could see.

I am still haunted 25 years later by watching a pod of orcas spend 6 hours hunting a grey whale calf to eat only its lower jaw and tongue. Attenborough’s narration is calm, clear and concise, unafraid to let the images and music hold our attention.

It may not have the glossy HD footage or drone shots of more recent series, but it changed the shape of nature documentaries.

It also blew my mind and sparked a life-long interest in the oceans. Without it, I wouldn’t have ended up at New Scientist!

Eleanor Parsons, magazine editor

(2006)

Those nighttime images of a massive pride of lions swarming over a fleeing young elephant have stayed with me ever since the first series was shown in 2006. The film-makers set out to create a spectacular, high-definition series, and boy did they achieve it.

The many notable moments in Planet Earth include a starving polar bear trying to catch walruses, eagles preying on cranes as they fly over the Himalayas, dolphins beaching themselves to hunt fish and bears climbing mountains to feast on moths. This is simply incredible television. Watch it now if you haven’t seen it. Watch it again if you have.

The second series, first shown in 2016, also made a notable departure. While Attenborough’s previous series all showed wildlife in pristine wildernesses, the last episode here, and in the third series (2023), is about animals living alongside people, from leopards and monkeys to falcons and otters.

I do think Attenborough has been right to aim to evoke wonder rather than despair in most of his programmes, but now there’s no denying we live on a much-changed planet.

Michael Le Page, reporter

(2011)

Wondrous and strange is the life that thrives at the very ends of Earth. Frozen Planet cast a loving eye over the inhabitants of the Arctic and Antarctica, hostile lands whose charms are apparent from the earliest moments of this excellent series. The narrative bounces back and forth from one pole to the other, treating us to scheming penguins, swimming snails, polar bears and a bison charging down wolves.

Among it all, the then 84-year-old David Attenborough, bundled up in a fetching array of parkas, makes the odd appearance as our all-terrain guide to these alien environments.

Casting a pall over proceedings, of course, were the advancing effects of climate change. The series’ seventh episode, “On Thin Ice”, was an explicit call for the world to do more to protect these magnificent ecosystems and those living in them, including humans.

The magic of Frozen Planet wasn’t just that it told us how global warming imperils the poles, it’s that it made us truly care about what we might be losing.

Bethan Ackerley, subeditor

(2020)

Like an ice core or tree ring, David Attenborough’s long and extraordinary life has come to be used as a yardstick for change. Socially, technologically and environmentally, the world of his youth was a far cry from the one we see today – and in this powerful film, Attenborough charts how we have degraded Earth’s ecosystems over his lifetime.

Released during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, A Life on Our Planet was a timely warning from a man who has seen more of Earth’s wonders – like this turtle, pictured swimming over a coral reef – than perhaps anyone else alive. Its marriage of the personal and the political makes it a different beast from most Attenborough films. Climate change, biodiversity loss and rampant pollution all feature, as Attenborough sets out what a child born in 2020 may witness over their lifetime. It makes for bleak viewing, but, as is a hallmark of more recent Attenborough works, it also supplies plenty of solutions to the environmental crises we’re living through – if we’d only apply them.

Bethan Ackerley, subeditor

(2022)

Prehistoric Planet is far from the first programme to try to bring long-extinct animals back to life on the small screen, but it is the best so far. Of course, the programme-makers had to use their imagination to some extent, but the series has been praised by palaeontologists for its accuracy and naturalism.

The three series feature many of the most iconic animals of the past, but shows them in new ways – we see Tyrannosaurus rex swimming and mating, for instance. There are lots of smaller, lesser-known animals, too. For me, the real stars are not the dinosaurs but the pterosaurs, brought back to life in stunning detail.

The third series jumps forward in time to the recent glacial periods, featuring animals such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and many more. The content is just as brilliant, but Tom Hiddleston replaces David Attenborough as the narrator. It’s just not the same without him.

Michael Le Page, reporter

(2026)

This very late entry to the David Attenborough canon became an instant classic in my household, since it was shown on New Year’s Day. We’ve rewatched the extraordinary exploits of London’s wildlife many times.

Yes, this one-off urban showcase has the foxes and pigeons you would expect, but not as you would expect to see them: vixens viciously squaring off on the streets of Tottenham and pigeons intelligently commuting on the tube from Hammersmith are standout moments.

But the bigger surprises come from how much the city’s nature has changed in recent decades. Peregrine falcons now soar over the centre, ring-necked parakeets have conquered the parks, Aesculapian snakes dangle from the trees along the Regent’s Canal and, since covid lockdowns, large numbers of fallow deer have taken to roaming parts of Romford.

The programme tours a London that is familiar to locals but rarely seen on screen: the community gardens, cemeteries and suburban parks that make the city an outstanding place to live, even for the nature-lovers who sometimes wonder if a megacity is the right place for them.

Perhaps their lingering doubt will be extinguished by Attenborough’s own assertion that he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

Penny Sarchet, managing editor