The best new popular science books of March 2026 include a new book from Rebecca Solnit

March, in the northern hemisphere anyway, is all about venturing outside to get some much-needed vitamin D and avoiding showers. Forget it, just head to a decent cafe where you can delve into the wonderful science books we have waiting for you. This month, you can discover how animals have shaped our world, how to spot liars through their language, what forest trees can tell us – and flowers as revolutionaries. There’s stronger stuff too, if you’re up for it: try AI in the hands of the US military, or a deep cultural look at how our world has changed beyond recognition. Whatever your choice, all of this is sure to enrich your interior.

What would a world look like if women made the rules? In an industry still largely run by men, this is an interesting question. According to her publishers, author Megha Mohan was inspired by her great-grandmother’s matrilineal community in southern India to travel the world in search of “lessons learned from societies where women make the rules.” Such societies have always existed, with modern micro-examples including South Korea’s unique feminist online trolls, cohabitation experiments in Paris and North London, and South Africa’s Rain Queens. And what might the different ways of collaborating, working, raising children – and especially the structures of power and identity – look like in such a world? Mohan – the BBC’s first global correspondent on gender and identity in 2018 – explores.

Are you getting the most out of AI? Assuming you have fewer and fewer choices in the matter, this is probably a plan to buckle down and read. Judging from Jamie Bartlett’s previous work, including The dark network, How to talk to the AI promises to answer the essentials of how AI thinks and reasons and the best ways to harness its (sorry) superhuman abilities. Expect to learn how some people are empowering their work and daily lives with AI, while others fall into conspiracy rabbit holes and/or suffer psychosis.

It is legitimate to say (as her editor does) that Suzanne Simard has helped transform our understanding of deep intelligence and the interconnectivity of trees. The bestselling author of Find the mother treeshe is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she leads the Mother Tree Project – and has a global reputation for her research into tree connectivity and communication and their impact on forest health and diversity. His new book, When the forest breathesexplores the deep-rooted cycles of renewal that sustain the forest and how they can also help us protect the global ecosystem. Simard grew up in British Columbia, in a family of loggers committed to sustainable management. His life was therefore very uniquely involved – which is often the subject of an excellent book. That’s it, I hope.

Animate by Michael Bond

Michael Bond is a former New scientist staff member and author of a growing stack of books exploring the inner world of how we shape each other (peer pressure, fans, belonging) and the outer world (travel and his own family’s role in settling the Canadian prairies). This time he takes a connected but different path, exploring how animals have shaped our minds and cultures, “from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were reprogrammed by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy.” If everything that makes us human is shared with other creatures, who are we and what is our place in the world? What is the new order? I’m looking forward to this one.

Can you spot a liar or separate truth from fiction? Who do you trust in these days of lies and deepfakes? Forensic psychologist Kirsty King may have a new way to help us navigate our way through the lies we all tell to get on with our lives, and the big ones that are extremely damaging. We need all the help we can get, given the failure of other approaches such as physiology (think micro-expressions, etc.). So, can lies be revealed by paying close attention to the language liars use? Drawing on research in forensic linguistics and psychology, King shares case studies and real-life stories to explore “narratives.” This should be a fascinating read.

This is a big statement: without flowers, human beings would not exist. But it appears that environmental scientist David George Haskell can confirm the hype in How Flowers Created Our World – subtitled “The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries.” He explores everything from “fascinating but less famous flowers like seagrass and tea to show us what we were missing,” to the power of plants as inventive agents, capable of “building and maintaining rainforests, savannahs, grasslands; and even ocean shores.” Looking to the future, he says flowers “offer us lessons about resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change.” So there’s a lot to celebrate there.

We may not have the world promised by Star Trek and so on, but anyone who has lived in a cordoned-off bunker for the last fifty or sixty years would still emerge into the blinking sunlight of the 21st century political landscape. Rebecca Solnit has been at the forefront of thinking on this topic for some time, winning plaudits and book award nominations along the way. His last, The beginning comes after the endsays its publisher, “is the culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach.” Let’s hope so.

What’s not to love about a book about sex? Better yet, a book about sex in animals – which promises to tell “the weird and wonderful science of how our planet is populated”. It is one of the New scientist 2026 Books to Watch, and its author, Lixing Sun, is a professor of biology at Central Washington University. A sneak peek reveals, among other things, that the female mole is a “true rebel of the animal kingdom” with both ovaries and testicles – and that California condors are capable of immaculate conception.

Could this book be more current? Maven Project by Katrina Manson is a sort of briefing on the hell we see on our screens every night as Operation Epic Fury unfolds in the Middle East. Manson tells the chilling story of how the US Department of Defense launched Project Maven in 2017, an initiative designed to harness artificial intelligence for military targeting. She’s a Bloomberg reporter who covers national security and big tech, so you can be sure she’ll know what she’s writing about. This sounds like a fascinating and compelling thing, but you may need a strong stomach.

Inevitable by F. Marina Schauffler

We’re quickly becoming accustomed to the acronym PFAS to describe per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, as well as the horrific global environmental legacy that lingers in the wake of so-called “forever chemicals.” These invisible, difficult-to-remove chemicals are found in the blood of most people on Earth, as they permeate daily life and the natural world. Reporter Marina Schauffler focuses on Maine, the northeasternmost state in the United States. She tells the stories of farmers, firefighters, tribal members, researchers, everyday homeowners and public officials as they suffer or battle PFAS contamination in a place known for its rich farms, woods and waters – and, apparently, at the forefront of PFAS testing and regulation. The harrowing stories here may be from the United States, but they could just as easily be somewhere near you.