plainpicture/Michiru Nakayama
Lots of science books will be published over the course of the coming year – tonnes, in fact. After spending last month wading through the books and publisher catalogues that came into our offices, I have decided on the science books that I am most excited about, arranged in categories so it is easy to find what you love throughout the year. Of course, if you are a bit of an omnivore like me, you could end the year an expert in everything from spotting psychopaths to very, very huge numbers.
Space
Let’s start at a grand scale, with environmental historian Dagomar Degroot’s Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean. He considers how the solar system shaped humanity, whether that’s Martian dust storms sparking stories about aliens, or comet impacts on Jupiter inspiring the first planetary defence strategy. Degroot also looks at human impact on the cosmos, calling for “interplanetary environmentalism” (lovely phrase).
We go from grand to even grander, as astrophysicist Emma Chapman’s Radio Universe reveals how we use radio waves to explore the distant universe. Chapman follows one on a journey from Earth into the wider Milky Way, passing black holes and pulsars.
New Scientist columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein also takes us on a journey in The Edge of Space-Time, drawing on poetry and culture to explain theoretical physics and the quantum nature of space-time.
Health
There are two strands to 2026’s health titles I am most excited about. The first is using science to make yourself healthier. In The Age Code, health journalist David Cox explores nutrition science and how to use it to slow biological ageing. Surgeon, clinical research director and self-confessed recovering alcoholic Charles Knowles reveals Why We Drink Too Much, and writer Bill Gifford tells us how we can use heat to improve our health in Hotwired. We evolved, Gifford argues, to exist in sweltering conditions, and temperature extremes can expand our physical and mental limits.
Aside from self-improvement, we have a phalanx of investigative writers probing what is really going on in the health industry. Celebrity doctor Xand van Tulleken promises to expose “the world of wellness to find a healthy way of living” in Make MeWell.
Science journalist Deborah Cohen’s Bad Influence looks at the world of internet medicine, from Ozempic influencers to AI-powered diagnoses, while Reuters columnist Aimee Donnellan brings her experience writing about business (including big pharma) to bear on GLP-1 drug Ozempic in Off the Scales. Then there is journalist Alev Scott’s Cash Cow, which tears into the fertility industry and how the “maternal body” has been commodified.
Maths
In the world of maths, we are thinking big this year, as two top mathematicians get stuck in. Richard Elwes’s Huge Numbers is a look at how counting higher and higher has shaped human thought, while Ian Stewart’s Reaching for the Extreme goes to the edges of mathematics to look at the biggest, smallest and prickliest of our mathematical conundrums.
Technology and AI
The Emergent Mind by computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist Gaurav Suri and psychology professor Jay McClelland is out to explain emergence, where complex systems arise as a result of the interactions of simpler systems.
The pair apply this to the human brain – and to AI – in a book that would be nicely complemented by Tom Griffiths’s The Laws of Thought. Here, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab shows how we use maths to describe thinking, looking at the ideas underlying modern AI, and how these differ from the ones about human minds.
Sticking with AI, sociologist James Muldoon’s Love Machines explores how our relationships are being changed by our interactions with tech, from chatbots to attempts to “resurrect” dead loved ones.
I also won’t be missing Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World in which the journalist and activist collaborate to tell the story of the rise of the far right, and what they call a “new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists”. Luckily the duo aren’t only investigating the situation, they are also telling us how we can resist it.
Two other tech books also caught my eye: the first is Little Blue Dot by investigative reporter Katherine Dunn, the story of the Global Positioning System. GPS was conceived as a military system, but daily life now depends on that blinking blue dot on our screens. And at a different scale, YouTuber and top construction influencer (yes, really) Fred Mills picks 10 megaprojects and looks at how they will transform the world in Mega Builds.
Environment
Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit offers us hope with her new book The Beginning Comes After the End. She talks about the revolution in human thinking over the past 50 years, and the changes we have seen around race, gender, sexuality, science and the environment. The old world is still fighting back, but Solnit reminds us the power to make change is within our reach. So does environment journalist Fred Pearce in Despite It All – a former New Scientist staffer, he has written a “handbook for climate hopefuls”, telling us it isn’t too late, that things can change for the better. His reasons for (cautious) hope include nature’s ability to thrive in unexpected places and humans reaching “peak stuff”.
Another shot of hope in a burning world comes from biology professor Dave Goulson’s Eat the Planet Well, on our toxic food system and how to solve it. And in The Surge, journalist Jeevan Vasagar considers rising flood waters over history – timely, given 150 million people will live below the high tide line by 2050. Here, the hope lies in the groundbreaking engineering solutions he shares.
“
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor collaborate to tell the story of the rise of the far right in their new book
“
Nature
Climate change is everywhere, including in Where the Earth Meets the Sky, the story of conservation biologist Louise K. Blight’s time studying penguins in Antarctica. She shows how global warming is altering this remote corner in her intriguing insight into working in the Antarctic wilderness.
The world that marine biologist Ruth Searle explores in The Intertidal Zone is a little warmer, but equally fascinating – a hugely dynamic and fragile ecosystem where land meets sea, constantly reshaped by humans.
Zoologist Jo Wimpenny is out to have some fun in Beauty of the Beasts, a defence of “nature’s least loved animals” (snakes, wasps, crocodiles and the like) and why we should champion them amid catastrophic biodiversity loss.
And who could resist biologist Lixing Sun’s dive into the “weird and wonderful” science of reproduction in On the Origin of Sex?
Meanwhile, just how profoundly animals have shaped human brains over millennia is revealed in Animate by Michael Bond, another former staffer at New Scientist.
Psychology
Homing in on our brain yields welcome surprises this year. I love Art Cure, in which psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt draws on neuroscience, psychology, immunology, physiology, behavioural science and epidemiology to show how the arts can improve our health and well-being. (I totally agree!)
“
Celebrity doctor Xand van Tulleken promises to expose ‘the world of wellness’ in Make Me Well
“
Elsewhere, two books by neuroscientists take on the techno-social change we are facing more directly, with Hannah Critchlow discovering how to become more resilient in The 21st Century Brain and Paul Goldsmith explaining in The Evolving Brain how our “ancient” minds evolved for a very different world than the one we inhabit, and what we need to thrive now.
Leanne ten Brinke is out to improve our lives more specifically in Poisonous People, as the psychopathy expert wants to help us identify the psychopaths, narcissists, manipulators and sadists in our lives and learn how to take evasive action.
There are also plenty of opportunities to examine how our brains work to build complex people and societies. In A World Appears, writer, academic and activist Michael Pollan explores the mystery of why we are conscious from scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical and psychedelic perspectives.
Elsewhere, other psychologists are hard at work: Paul Eastwick looks at the science of attraction, sex and relationships in Bonded by Evolution, while Melissa Maffeo’s Science of the Supernatural uses neuroscience and psychology to explain alien abductions and psychic readings.
Clearly, it is time to clear out our bookshelves to make way for this year’s rich new treasures!
THE BEST OF THE BEST: FOUR TOP PICKS FOR 2026
A Brief History of the Universe (and Our Place In It)
by Sarah Alam Malik
Particle physicist Sarah Alam Malik explores discoveries that changed our perception of the cosmos, from the Babylonians tracking the skies on clay tablets to the Copernican revolution.
The Savage Landscape
by Cal Flyn
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn was a highlight of 2021 for me. In her new book, she travels deep into isolated wilds, exploring the nature of wilderness and how to protect wild places.
I Am Not a Robot
by Joanna Stern
Wall Street Journal technology reporter Joanna Stern (pictured) spent a year using AI to do almost everything and to replace almost everyone, just to see what happened. A brilliant, and terrifying, idea.
The Story of Birds
by Steve Brusatte
Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte turns to the evolutionary history of the birds, the “dinosaurs among us”. Penguins the size of gorillas? Ducks weighing more than cows? I’m in.