The best new popular science books of September 2026

This month seems to be full of celebrity, whether as subjects of our latest science books or as their authors. There are new books from physicist Carlo Rovelli, doctor and presenter Xand van Tulleken, broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili and leading scholar of our relationship with tech, Sherry Turkle, as well as a biography of Stephen Hawking. As ever, we range far and wide, from great biographies to the world’s darker, problematic corners. On the Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli (translated by Simon Carnell) Carlo Rovelli’s latest offering, On the Equality of All Things, certainly looks like a broad-ranging virtuoso. New Scientist reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan has already gone the distance with the book, and their review will be published soon. They write that physics, as the science that describes all the ingredients of our physical reality and how they interact with each other, has a strong claim on how we understand our surroundings – but what about its grasp on meaning-making more broadly? Rovelli apparently tackles this question to great effect, arguing that with the advent of quantum physics, science underwent a revolution, but philosophers haven’t fully caught up, and he aims to offer them – and the rest of us – a crash course. Padavic-Callaghan finds his final lesson inspiring: “We face the world not as an ‘I’ faced with a ‘this’ but as a ‘me’ faced with a ‘you’. We are in the world. We are here. And we are home.” Rovelli is saying that seeing ourselves as abstract consciousnesses disconnected from the world and looking for truths beyond how the world touches us is a fool’s errand. “Interesting” barely touches the sides with Rovelli. Make Me Well by Xand van Tulleken “If anyone can drag the wellness industry into the light and make you laugh while doing it, it’s Xand van Tulleken. Beautifully researched, clear-eyed and very funny,” said mathematician Hannah Fry of Make Me Well: A quest to understand the confusing world of wellness. Xand van Tulleken (one of identical twin brothers, both doctors, and both writers) sets out to take a hard look at a sector already worth billions – and largely unregulated. He digs into everything from the supposed benefits of vitamin D supplements and turmeric tablets to wearable health technology, blood tests and so-called anti-ageing pills. And he finds that the claims made for the above by influencers, tech companies, podcasters and their ilk mostly don’t stand up to hard science. This may be unsurprising to regular readers, but it can’t be documented too many times as we face an extraordinary surge in innovation, transforming drug design, genomics and diagnostics that yields ever more complexity and confusion. So how do we stay healthy, facing such an onslaught – and naked corporate greed? Quite likely, we could do worse than start here… Advertisement Hawking: His life and work by Graham Farmelo What a challenge: write the first major biography of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, a man who faced enormous physical challenges just to stay alive beyond his twenties, who lived on to defy the odds and contribute pioneering science – some of which has only quite recently been worked through. Factor in both the Hawking estate (which supported the work) and the whole scientific world (especially many of the stars also interviewed by the biographer) all watching closely to see the result. But it would be surprising if veteran science writer Graham Farmelo dropped the ball in Hawking: His life and work. Hawking is the man, after all, who travelled the farthest reaches of the universe from his wheelchair, and ended up shedding important light on the mysteries of black holes and our understanding of the beginnings of the universe, not to mention selling more than 25 million copies globally of his A Brief History of Time. Kudos all round. On Time by Jim Al-Khalili Anyone who’s tangled with Carlo Rovelli’s elegiac approach to physics will come away enriched and full of wonder. His book The Order of Time, published in English in 2018, was a case in point – as much a meditation as an exposition. Jim Al-Khalili on the other hand is our go-to for a seriously comprehensive overview – plus his own share of lofty questions. New Scientist’s Joshua Howgego found his latest both excellent and meaty, as it tackled the various tricky problems in grappling with time. Al-Khalili, he wrote, is known as a “brilliant explainer of science and his focus here is explanation… He is at pains to be clear, fair and methodical.” Howgego found the earlier parts of On Time “supremely helpful” in teasing apart the deeply interconnected strands, separating them into two categories. First are the problems of “manifest time” (that’s how we experience it, flow, the sense of past and present), then, second, there is physical time (to do with how various fields of physics interpret time differently and how to resolve the tensions that result). Just one word of warning – it’s not a fat book, but it is dense. Enjoy. Cloudy with a Chance of Starships by Seven Rasmussen It is billed as “an entertaining tour of the seemingly simple formula guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence”, and the first part of the title certainly raises a laugh – Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake equation reveals the odds of life in the cosmos. The author Seven Rasmussen is an astrobiologist, so should know how to take the readers off on what is probably a rather irreverent trip round an equation that has become important to many within and around the scientific community: after all, who doesn’t want to know how likely ET really is? The Drake equation calculates the number of civilizations in our galaxy that humans could potentially contact and was first proposed in 1961 by another astrobiologist, Frank Drake. It begins, say the publishers, with well-known numbers for the rate of star formation in the Milky Way and the fraction of stars with planetary systems but gets more complex with a dive into areas such as the number of planets suitable for life, the fraction of suitable planets on which life appears and the likelihood of intelligent life emerging on a planet and becoming technological. The publishers say Cloudy with a Chance of Starships guides readers from the basics of astronomy to the frontiers of planetary science, calling it an “extraordinary book” which “shares a tantalizing vision of the dawning era of space exploration and invites enthusiasts of all ages to join in the discovery”. Buckle up then. Guilty Pleasure by Patricia Nilsson You might need a strong stomach for this one. Guilty Pleasure: The pornification of the internet, the economy, and everything else is billed as “the story of one of the most influential – and least examined – industries on earth” – that is pornography in the online age. Worth billions and generating, says the book, an almost unbelievable tenth of global internet traffic at peak times, it is changing our world at every level, from tech to work and culture to love and relationships – even our sense of self. Investigative journalist and FT reporter Patricia Nilsson draws on five years of reporting to show how the internet turned pornography into “a vast, secretive industry dominated by obscure owners, platform logic and profit at almost any cost”, as her publisher puts it. Nilsson takes on what can only be a difficult, unpleasant task that few would countenance. Sounds like we may at least owe her our attention. Boglands by Merritt Turetsky There are few places on earth quite like bogs and boglands. Their ecology is truly unique, and they are home to abundant amphibian-eating plants and acid-flinging mosses. This is the world conjured by ecologist Merritt Turetsky in her book, Boglands: The hidden world of Earth’s most extraordinary ecosystems. She should know; Turetsky is a climate scientist, with hundreds of scientific articles on the importance of bogs to global climate. She advises governments, communities, and professional networks worldwide so they can understand the importance of bogs to the global climate. Above all, say the publishers of Boglands, “bogs are places of paradox, where past meets present in the remarkably preserved artefacts and bodies entombed in their depths, land meets water in an otherworldly landscape, and safety meets danger for those who dare to venture into the heart of the bog”. There’s a beguiling, if somewhat unnerving, invitation, and one bound to challenge how you see the natural world. James Webb’s Ancient Cosmos by Maggie Aderin and Sarah Wild Insider books are often full of interesting knowledge you just can’t get at any other way – and James Webb’s Ancient Cosmos: A journey to the beginning of time certainly sounds like it will be one of them. Maggie Aderin has huge hands-on expertise and insights to share because she worked on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which, with its six-and-a-half-metre primary mirror, achieves a very high resolution. Working with science journalist Sarah Wild, the book promises to be an “essential guide to the latest James Webb images, revealing what these discoveries mean for our understanding of the universe and human history”. It’s quite a journey, beginning in our own galaxy and using the James Webb images as “route markers towards this cosmic dawn.. explaining some of cosmology’s greatest mysteries, from the shape of the universe to the nature of dark matter”. It will be interesting to see what it adds to her 2024 book, Webb’s Universe, reviewed in New Scientist, which featured JWST pictures including of the Carina and the Ring nebulae, The Pillars of Creation and the Cartwheel galaxy. ReGen: by David R. Montgomery With wildfire, flooding and El Niño dominating the news agenda, global food scarcity can hardly be far behind. Enter earth scientist David R. Montgomery and his new book, Regen: A new future for farming, food, and health. His message is that a century of conventional farming has left our planet with sick soil, accelerating the interlinked crises of food security, biodiversity loss, water pollution and climate change. But thankfully he has a plan in the shape of regenerative farming, honed from a decade of research, interviewing farmers and seeing how they restored degraded farms all around the world. ReGen, say the publishers, “breaks down common myths around conventional and organic farming, animal agriculture and plant-based diets to frame ten policy recommendations for sustainably nourishing the world”. It also looks to build on Growing a Revolution, a previous book by Montgomery. Reviewing it, New Scientist called Montgomery “one of our most eloquent and precise earth science communicators… [He] has a knack for opening our minds to large, critically important questions.” Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle As of 2025, nearly a third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support. This is the scary background to Sherry Turkle’s latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who we become when we talk to machines. She’s had years at MIT researching digital culture, writing 10 previous books exploring many facets of how technology has reshaped our outer and inner worlds, sometimes isolating us and leading us to “expect more from technology and less from each other”. Now, Turkle has an “urgent warning about how ever-increasing reliance on AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy”, as we redefine human capacities for care, solitude and intimacy in terms of machines. She “evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots” as they work hard to be our “‘perfect’ companion.. and ask for nothing in return”. Intimate machines, says Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed and lonely than ever – and less equipped to reverse course, as machine relationships offer no practice for getting along with people. The Universe by Jillian Scudder, illustrated by Lily Fossett You really need the subtitle here to get the whole, er, picture. The Universe: A graphic guide is unusual among general science books for adults, but it offers a perfectly serious, well-illustrated entry point to a topic that’s literally as big as it gets. Jillian Scudder, an astrophysicist and associate professor of physics and astronomy, is an ideal intergalactic tour guide, making sure that you work your way through the building blocks of life, the mysteries of dark matter, how stars are classified, the moon’s origins or why stars collapse. You need never worry about just what Cosmic Noon is either – the answer’s here, easily explained. And Lily Fossett’s illustrations are also gloriously unintimidating. Like a soothing cup of tea, The Universe is one of life’s instant small pleasures. Autisms by Darian Leader Given the current disquiet over the nature of autism, it may be a timely thing that Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst and writer, has titled his book Austisms. With Uta Frith, one of the original leaders in autism research, calling in May for a return to the drawing board in the face of rising levels of diagnosis, there are many issues muddying the waters. The radical split between the ways autism is perceived means that for some, it is a condition or a pathology, while for others it is an identity or a natural variation in human cognitive and behavioural diversity. Drawing on years of clinical experience and research, and the testimonies of autistic people, Leader’s book promises to be “an up-to-the minute account of the many indicative features of autism and how they have been assessed and treated over almost a century”, the publishers promise. Clarity amid the complexity and contradiction from an “illuminating guide” ought to be welcome. Ark: A visual treasury of Earth’s living wonders by Stephen Ellcock, Helen Scales, Harriet Rix and more If you love brilliant curation and stunning images of the natural world we need to save, then this compilation definitely sounds worth a shot – especially if you like your call-to-arms a bit glossy. The images range from tiny microscopic wonders and networks of fungi to medicinal plants and the animal species that share our world – drawn from every culture and era. The point, say the publishers, is that Ark “reveals the unique importance and beauty of the living things depicted and, in doing so, prompts readers to reevaluate humanity’s place in the natural world”. It’s been curated by Stephen Ellcock, who has made a name for himself as a curator, writer, researcher and an online collector of a huge number of images. He’s backed up by an impressive group of nature writers and academics: the foreword comes from Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks and Is a River Alive?), with essays helping to tie it all together by the likes of Harriet Rix (The Genius of Trees), marine biologist Helen Scales (What the Wild Sea Can Be and The Brilliant Abyss) and birder Stephen Moss (Ten Birds That Changed the World). When you make a purchase via the links on this page, we receive a commission.