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

March, in the northern hemisphere anyway, is about venturing out for some much-needed vitamin D and dodging showers. Forget that – just head for a decent café where you can delve into the marvellous science books we’ve got waiting for you. This month you can explore how animals shaped our world, how to spot liars from their language, what forest trees can tell us – and flowers as revolutionaries. There is some stronger stuff too, if you are in the mood: 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, it’s all guaranteed to enrich the inner you.

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

Are you getting the best out of AI? Assuming you have increasingly little choice in the matter, it’s probably a plan to buckle down and read up. To judge by Jamie Bartlett’s earlier work, especially The Dark Net, How to Talk to AI promises to deliver on the nitty-gritty of how AI thinks and reasons and the best ways to exploit its (sorry) super-human abilities. Expect to learn how some folks are turbo-charging work and everyday life with AI, while others are falling down conspiracy rabbit holes and/or experiencing psychosis.

It’s a fair claim to say (as her publisher does) that Suzanne Simard has helped transform our understanding of the profound intelligence and interconnectedness of trees. The bestselling author of Finding the Mother Tree, she is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she leads The Mother Tree Project – and has a global reputation for research on tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and diversity of forests. Her new book, When the Forest Breathes, taps into the deep-rooted cycles of renewal that sustain the forest and how they can also help us to protect the world’s ecosystem. Simard grew up in British Columbia, in a family of loggers committed to sustainable stewardship, so her life has been a very singularly committed one – which often makes for a great book. Here’s hoping.

Animate by Michael Bond

Michael Bond is a former New Scientist staffer and author of a growing pile of books exploring the inner world of how we shape each other (peer pressure, fans, belonging) and the outer world (wayfaring and his own family’s part in settling the Canadian prairies). This time he sets off on a connected but different track, exploring how animals shaped our minds and cultures, “from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were rewired by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to the medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy”. If everything that was thought to make us human is shared with other creatures, who are we and what is our place in the world? What is the new order? Looking forward to this one.

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

It’s a big claim: without flowers, human beings would not exist. But sounds like environmental scientist David George Haskell can back up the publishing hype in How Flowers Made Our World – subtitled “The story of nature’s revolutionaries”. He delves into everything from the “fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we’ve been missing”, to the power of plants as inventive agents, able to “build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies; and even ocean shores”. Looking to the future, he says that flowers “offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change”. Lots to celebrate there then.

We may not have the world promised by Star Trek and the like, but anyone living in a sealed off bunker for the past fifty or sixty years would still emerge into the sunlight blinking at the political landscape of the 21st century. Rebecca Solnit has been at the forefront of thinking about this for quite a while, winning plaudits and nominations for book awards as she goes. Her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End, her publisher says, “is a 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 like in a book about sex? Even better, a book about sex in animals– which promises to tell “the weird and wonderful science of how our planet is populated”. This is one of New Scientist’s 2026 books to watch out for, and its author, Lixing Sun, is a professor of biology at Central Washington University. A sneak peek reveals, among much else, that the female mole is a “true rebel of the animal kingdom” with both ovaries and testes – and that California condors are capable of immaculate conception.

Could this book be any more timely? Project Maven by Katrina Manson is a kind-of briefing for 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 is a Bloomberg reporter who covers national security and cutting-edge tech, so you can be pretty sure she will know what she’s writing about. This looks to be fascinating and compelling stuff– but you may need a strong stomach.

Inescapable by F. Marina Schauffler

We’re fast getting used to the acronym PFAS to describe per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and the horrifying global environmental legacy trailing in the wake of what are labelled “forever chemicals”. These invisible, hard-to-remove chemicals are in the blood of most people on Earth, as they permeate everyday life and the natural world. Journalist Marina Schauffler zeros in on Maine, the US’s most north-easterly state. She tells the stories of farmers, firefighters, tribal members, researchers, everyday homeowners and officials as they suffer from, or fight back against, PFAS contamination in a place known for its rich farms, woods and waters – and, apparently, at the forefront of PFAS testing and regulation. The poignant accounts here may be from the US, but it could equally well be somewhere near you.