The best new popular science books of January 2026 include titles by Claudia Hammond and Deborah Cohen

Here in the northern hemisphere, January always feels like the longest, drabbest month of the year, so how lucky we are to have a host of new science books to enliven our days. This month, we can explore everything from what the arts bring to our lives to the unsung hero that is friction. How about the origin of ideas? Or what we lose when we light up our skies? Perhaps January isn’t long enough…

Art Cure by Daisy Fancourt

What if playing the piano, dancing, visiting art galleries or even lying in the mud listening to Wolf Alice at Glastonbury was good for the body, mind and longevity? Or what if it could help us develop brain resilience against dementia? That’s just part of the tantalising, ambitious pitch by Daisy Fancourt in her new book. In theory, she’s well-placed to make the case as a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and director of the WHO’s arts and health initiative. British TV doctor Xand van Tulleken is calling it an “amazing antidote” to the “deluge of nonsense” we’re given daily about how to live better. A licence to have fun – what’s not to love?

Here’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves – and promptly poured another glass as we ponder. The story of why we use alcohol for everything from celebrating to de-stressing and fitting in (biology, not moral failing) is in the hands of surgeon and clinical researcher Charles Knowles. As he just happens to be a recovering alcoholic, this should be the ultimate insider view on what happens in our brains, why and how alcohol hijacks our survival instincts, overrides the ability to choose, and, crucially, how drinking can spiral out of control. Even more crucially, he has a scientific “blueprint” for how to escape this vicious cycle. Less moralising and more sciencing – good call.

We all do it – run to the internet to look for help when we’re sick. Or if we want to become the best version of ourselves – with wonderfully low blood pressure, perfect blood sugar, not a smidge of excess fat, and perfectly focused on being happy, successful citizens. But who are these experts who live online, who don’t know our personal medical history? Science writer Deborah Cohen asks why we would trust them with our lives, given no evidence of their qualifications or impartiality. Good question. Hope she’s got some good answers.

Polar War by Kenneth R. Rosen

What happens as the Arctic melts is something we will all have to wake up to – and fast – as pipelines are sabotaged, global communications lines breached, and untapped natural resources are exposed in a new race for position and power? No wonder geopolitical writer and sometime war correspondent Kenneth Rosen has got stuck into a world that will justify the book’s subtitle: “submarines, spies and the struggle for power in a melting Arctic”. Terrifying, in a good way.

Does everything have start in the centre – from big cities, established ideas, from convention in all its forms? No, says Charles Foster, in what looks to be a thought-provoking countertheory: the best ideas happen at the edges. In what is billed as a “fascinating and philosophical travel book”, Foster sets out for “the far frontiers of the planet… and of human culture and consciousness to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and of life itself”. Stirring stuff if it delivers on even half of this.

Forget the festive period: everyday life feels accelerated, with too much to do and less time in which to do it. This phenomenon has even got a name for the effect it produces – overwhelm. How do we make it stop? BBC journalist Claudia Hammond takes this on, dividing her book into chapters addressing everything from procrastination to the fear of regret, the drive to perfectionism and endless to-do lists. She offers a psychological toolkit and a pile of science to stop us from burning out among her “ways to take the pressure off”, as the book’s subtitle flags up. Timely, for sure.

Whether you’re fighting to lose weight or concerned about the implications of getting what you think you want, GLP-1 drug Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs are bound to make more headlines this year. Reuters columnist Aimee Donnellan is out to weave together the inside story of the race by Novo Nordisk to develop a ”cure” for obesity with Ozempic, a diabetes medication that targets the GLP-1 hormone and makes people feel fuller for longer, with economics, politics, social implications – and the underlying  scientific question: are these drugs too good to be true?

Every year, our night skies are getting at least 120 per cent brighter – and this isn’t just a big deal for astronomers, but also for our wildlife (not to mention our sleep cycles). In Nightfaring, travel writer and “dark sky” advocate Megan Eaves-Egenes travels the world to get to grips with our connection with the night sky. Billed as a way of “finding solace in the stars at a time of difficulty in her own life”, she embarks on a journey that takes her from New Zealand to Uzbekistan, Italy to Japan, Germany to the Himalayas, exploring what darkness means globally and over time – and most of all, it seems, what we are in danger of losing.

Friction by Jennifer Vail

The story of an invisible force can make great reading – and the “biography” of friction, as author Jennifer Vail calls it, seems promisingly left-field. We’re talking here about the force that resists motion we encounter in daily life (think creaking door hinges, or car tyres worn smooth by the motorway), but also its power from the first spark of fire through the industrial revolution to the unexpected role in the race to understand viruses, and lots more. It is an unsung hero to most (though not, of course, to Newton, da Vinci and their ilk) – though hopefully not for much longer.

From Ada Lovelace’s pioneering algorithms and Alan Turing’s famous test of machine intelligence to Deep Blue’s chess victory, ChatGPT, this is pitched as a whistlestop tour of the monuments and failures in the great and unfolding AI story. It looks fun, from a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The big question, of course, is: can this huge story really be contained in a short book? Well, Carlo Rovelli managed it for physics, so fingers crossed.