The Guardian Science 2025

The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity.In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn’t even be close.How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.The world is racing to build something truly new under the sun. And if anyone builds it, everyone dies.EndorsementsInstant New York Times bestseller.“May prove to be the most important book of our time.” — Tim Urban, Wait But Why“The best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I've ever read.” — Yishan Wong, Former CEO of Reddit

Anyone alive today belongs to the tiny fraction of species that have survived: more than 90% of the species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction?Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept — and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable.Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devastating consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion.Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breathtaking storytelling to show that extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human one that illuminates our past and may alter our future.From an award-winning historian of race, science and empire, this is a path-breaking and poignant history of extinction as a scientific idea, an imperial legacy and a political choice.EndorsementsShortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize 2025Guardian & Telegraph Best Science Book 2025Waterstones Best Popular Science Book 2025'A vital and important book' — David Olusoga

At the heart of Is a River Alive? is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings, who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Macfarlane takes the reader on a mind-expanding global journey into the history, futures, people and places of the ancient, urgent concept.Around the world, rivers are dying from pollution, drought and damming. But a powerful movement is also underway to recognize the lives and the rights of rivers, and to re-animate our relationships with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. The young "rights of nature" movement has lit up activists, artists, law-makers and politicians across six continents—and become the focus for revolutionary thinking about rivers in particular.The book flows like water, from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys. The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by Canadian gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is underway. The third is to northeastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river—the Mutehekau or Magpie—is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign led by an extraordinary Innu poet and leader called Rita Mestokosho.From the celebrated writer, observer and naturalist Robert Macfarlane comes a brilliant, perspective-shifting new book, which answers a resounding "yes" to the question of its title. Is a River Alive? is at once a literary work of art, a rallying cry and a catalyst for change. It is a book that will open hearts, spark debates and challenge perspectives. A clarion call to re-centre rivers in our stories, law and politics, it invites us to radically re-imagine not only rivers but life itself. At the heart of this vital, beautiful book is the recognition that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.

For three decades, renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms and faced the limits of human endurance to explore questions of how life survived and adapted, and what our future on a changing planet may hold.Scientific discoveries at Earth’s polar regions have changed the way we see the world and these insights are becoming ever more urgent. These landscapes are the epicenter for rapid change to our planet, with ice retreating, animal species moving toward the equator or going extinct, Indigenous communities confronting dramatic environmental changes, and political battles heating up for newly accessible mineral and gas resources. In the end, what happens at the poles does not stay in the poles—events there in the coming years will affect all life and every nation on the planet. The book blends travel, science, and environmental writing to deepen our understanding of animal and plant life, the history of our ice ages, the age of dinosaurs, the history of Western exploration, and the clues meteorites preserved at the poles contain about the cosmos.Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Shubin shares lively adventure stories from the field to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions and to reveal the poles’ impact on the rest of life on the planet.

In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad — now St Petersburg — and began the longest blockade in recorded history. By the most conservative estimates, the siege would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million people. Most died of starvation.At the centre of the embattled city stood a converted palace that housed the greatest living plant library ever amassed — the world's first seed bank. After attempts to evacuate the collection failed, and as supplies dwindled, the scientists responsible faced a terrible choice: should they distribute the specimens to the starving population, or preserve them in the hope that they held the key to ending global famine?Drawing on previously unseen sources, The Forbidden Garden tells the remarkable and moving story of the botanists who remained at the Plant Institute during the darkest days of the siege, risking their lives in the name of science.EndorsementsWinner of the 2023 Wingate Literary Prize.

Dr. Topol’s unprecedented, evidence-based guide is about how you and your family and friends can benefit from new treatments coming available at a faster rate than ever. From his unique position as a leader overseeing millions of dollars in research funding, Dr. Topol also explains the fundamental reasons — from semaglutides to AI — that we can be confident these breakthroughs will continue. Ninety-five percent of Americans over sixty have at least one chronic disease and almost as many have two. That is the essential problem this revolution is solving. He explains the power of the new approaches to the worst chronic killers — diabetes/obesity, heart disease, cancer, and neurodegeneration — and how treatments can begin long before middle age, and even long after. In thirty years, we will have five times as many people at least one hundred years old, and they will be healthier than ever because of the breakthroughs Dr. Topol describes.The amazing discoveries Topol brings into sharp focus are deeply inspiring about our human potential. We can now realistically see how we can make considerable headway for preventing age-related diseases and may one day be able to slow the body-wide aging process itself.Super Agers is a detailed guide to a revolution transforming human longevity. This is a breakthrough moment in the history of human health care.

I'm a neurologist. Diagnosis is my bread and butter. So why then would I, an experienced medical doctor, be very careful about which diagnosis I would pursue for myself or would be willing to accept if foisted upon me?We live in an age of diagnosis. The advance of sophisticated genetic sequencing techniques means that we may all soon be screened for potential abnormalities. The internet provides a vast array of information that helps us speculate about our symptoms. Conditions like ADHD and autism are on the rapid rise, while other new categories like Long Covid are driven by patients themselves.When we are suffering, it feels natural to seek a diagnosis. We want a clear label, understanding, and, of course, treatment. But is diagnosis an unqualified good thing? Could it sometimes even make us worse instead of better?Through the moving stories of real people, neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan explores the complex world of modern diagnosis, comparing the impact of a medical label to the pain of not knowing. With scientific authority and compassionate storytelling, she opens up new possibilities for how we might approach our health and our suffering.

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate works, from Dante’s Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings — the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.Endorsements'Lively and fascinating. I loved it' — David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in your Ear?'A history of the world in microcosm' — Douglas Preston, author of The Lost City of the Monkey God‘Superb. A truly extraordinary detective story’ — Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything

Francis Crick was the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, a pioneering neuroscientist, and an audacious genius.What are the moments that make a life? In Francis Crick’s, the decisive moment came in 1951, when he first met James Watson. Their ensuing discovery of the structure of DNA made Crick world-famous. But neither that chance meeting nor that discovery made Crick who he was.As Matthew Cobb shows in Crick, another chance encounter — with a line from the writing of Beat poet Michael McClure — reveals Crick’s character: "This is the powerful knowledge." Crick, having read it, would keep it with him for the rest of his life, a token of his desire to solve the riddles of existence. John Keats once accused scientists of merely wanting to "unweave a rainbow," but it was an irrepressible, Romantic urge to wonder that defined Crick as much as a desire to find the basis of life in DNA and the workings of our minds.For the first time, Cobb presents the full portrait of Crick, a scientist and a man: his triumphs and failings, insights and oversights. Crick set out to find the powerful knowledge. Almost miraculously, he did.Endorsements"A thrilling biography of one of the 20th century’s greatest minds" — David Eagleman

From the award-winning science writer, a new history of the development of nuclear power and the extraordinary minds behind itHenry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in Paris in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age.Destroyer of Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and, following the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, opened the way to a still more terrible thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on Earth — from anywhere.The story spans decades and continents, moving from Becquerel to Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge-based New Zealand scientist who first split the atom, expands to include Enrico Fermi in Rome, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, leading to the appearance of Robert Oppenheimer before climaxing with increasingly horrifying developments in the USA and USSR. The roles of three remarkable women — Lise Meitner, Ida Noddack and Irene Curie — are re-evaluated, and there are new insights into the work of Ettore Majorana, Fermi’s mercurial but brilliant assistant, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, possibly after foreseeing the explosive power of nuclear energy. Above all, this is a story of how knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships, and indeed by chance, in a remarkable way.