Archives de catégorie : Popular Science

AI, ANIMALS, AND US de Max Taylor

How AI is transforming the lives of billions of animals—and what we can do about it.

AI, ANIMALS, AND US:
What Artificial Intelligence Holds for All Species
by Max Taylor
HarperOne, March 2027

Like it or not, AI is rapidly reshaping human life. But what does it mean for other species? In AI, Animals, and Us, researcher Max Taylor explores the surprising world of whale translators, robot dogs, AI-powered mega-farms, and the even stranger territory that lies ahead.

After reading, you’ll know how AI could:

Reveal what animals are really communicating
Change how you care for your pets
Open up new ways to help wild animals
Transform the lives of farmed animals – for better or worse

Along the way, this book tackles some of the biggest questions around AI:

What’s driving breakneck AI progress, and will it continue?
Could AI itself ever become conscious?
How can we shape AI’s values before they get set in stone?
How do we prepare ourselves—and our fellow species—for such an unpredictable future?

Most AI discussions stop at humans. AI, ANIMALS, AND US explores AI’s sweeping consequences for every species on the planet, not just our own—and how we can shape them while there’s still time. This book is for readers drawn to the big-picture thinking of Sapiens, the wonder of My Octopus Teacher, or the sharp futuristic vision of Black Mirror.

Max Taylor is a Senior Researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), where he helps identify particularly promising organizations and projects for animal advocacy donors. Prior to ACE, he spent six years in the U.K. Civil Service, most recently leading on the government’s animal welfare labelling policy. Alongside his work at ACE, he works on various projects seeking to ensure AI benefits all species, including writing the monthly Sentient Futures newsletter. He also serves on the executive committee of the U.K. Labour Party’s Animal Welfare Society.

AI NATIVE de Kai-Fu Lee

A sweeping roadmap for business leaders in the AI age, when every organization must rethink how it operates, competes, and creates value—from AI legend and New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers and AI 2041 Kai-Fu Lee.

AI NATIVE:
The Mandate to Transform Your Company
by Kai-Fu Lee
Crown Currency, November 2026

Two years ago, the best AI agents could autonomously complete tasks that took a human expert roughly six minutes to complete. Today, top AI agents across nearly all white-collar industries can complete the workday of the smartest humans in less time than a coffee break—at a fraction of the cost. 

What happens when the most expensive thing that companies buy—human thinking—becomes practically free?

This is the single most consequential question facing business leaders for a generation, and many are struggling with how to answer it. AI is not simply another technology cycle but a fundamental transformation in the economics of business. The answer is not to dabble. It is to become AI NATIVE.

Kai-Fu Lee has spent the past four decades pioneering AI in business from nearly every vantage point: as a researcher, senior executive at Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and now a CEO himself. Few thinkers can match his combination of technical expertise and business acumen. 

In AI NATIVE, he draws from this deep well of experience to offer a radical new roadmap for company leaders to become AI Native. With punchy, insightful guidance, Lee dispels the lies CEOs are being told about AI, offers a clear roadmap for how to re-structure teams with powerful agentic AI at the center of the enterprise, and reveals the power and potential of using AI to tap into the hidden trove of knowledge inside companies. Those that get it right will flourish in the AI age.

AI NATIVE is the only book leaders need to navigate the defining challenge of our time.

Kai-Fu Lee is a pioneering expert in AI whose insights are recognized around the world. A former senior executive at Google, Microsoft and Apple, he is currently the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the founder of 01.AI, a global company focused on AI transformation with agentic AI. A New York Times bestselling author, his most recent book AI 2041 was named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Financial Times and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Lee has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. His numerous honors include being named to the Time 100 and Wired 25 Icons lists.

LOST IN SPACE de Neil deGrasse Tyson et Lindsey Nyx Walker

Prepare for liftoff with a sweeping new book on the universe from the world’s most celebrated astrophysicist, brimming with wit, authority, and laugh-out-loud humor.

LOST IN SPACE:
5,000 Facts for Navigating the Universe
by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker
National Geographic, September 2026
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Filled with 5,000 tantalizing facts and more than 300 charts, maps, and photographs, this book offers a dazzling look at the cosmos from our home planet to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Strap in for a thrilling journey through our solar system to the edge of the cosmos. This alluring treasury of 5,000 facts will take you there and back again, learning and laughing all the way.

With an eye-popping design and bold illustrations, Lost in Space takes on humanity’s exploration of the universe—telescopes, space missions, planets, moons, exoplanets, stars, galaxies, and more—backed by signature scientific know-how and a large dose of hilarity. In these pages, you’ll discover that:

• 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second.
• If you weigh 150 pounds on Earth, you’d weigh 380 pounds on Jupiter.
• In 500 billion years, our sun will become a red giant star and expand to 100 times its original size.
• In 1999, astronomers discovered five exoplanets orbiting the same sun.
• Astronomers estimate there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

Bursting with cool space photos, breathtaking archival images, infographics, moon maps, and a plethora of pop culture icons, Lost in Space is not just a journey—it’s a trip!

« Bursting with insights—often quite funny—that will spark the imaginations of readers young and old; one can eat it up in a long sitting or sporadically thumb through it and be dazzled by its revelations and colorful images. » —Starred review, Kirkus Reviews

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of more than a dozen books, many of them international bestsellers, and numerous articles. He is the host of StarTalk, a podcast, and of two seasons of Cosmos, televised by Fox and National Geographic. He has received 27 honorary doctorates as well as NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. He lives in New York City.

Lindsey Nyx Walker is the senior producer and head writer at StarTalk, a popular science podcast and a four-time Emmy nominated television show on the National Geographic Channel. She collaborated on both Cosmic Queries and the New York Times bestseller To Infinity and Beyond, the second and third books, respectively, in the publishing collaboration between StarTalk and National Geographic Books. She lives in New York City. Visit her on TikTok @spacetok.

COGNITIVE EXTINCTION de Nita Farahany

A sobering look at how digital life is eroding our thinking, our freedom, and what it means to be human―and how to reclaim what we’ve lost.

COGNITIVE EXTINCTION:
Saving Human Thought While We Still Can
by Nita Farahany
St. Martin’s Press, March 2027

Something is disappearing from human life: our ability to think freely, engage meaningfully with others, and be present in our own lives. Can we adapt to the modern world without losing the qualities that make us human?

In COGNITIVE EXTINCTION, Nita Farahany, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies, names what is happening: we are losing our cognitive liberty, the ability to trust our perceptions and govern ourselves. We can sense this intuitively, but we don’t recognize that these struggles present a dire threat to our institutions and the common ground beneath us all―the cognitive commonwealth itself.

After years of questioning these alarming trends, she found answers when she least expected it: through her own grief. When her daughter, Callista, passed away, Farahany’s cognitive world collapsed. As she tried to make sense of what was happening, she discovered that the mental capacities she had lost mirrored those being hollowed out across society through digital immersion.

What has been degraded, Farahany argues, can still be rebuilt. That begins with each of us. We must resist the temptation to sleepwalk into cognitive extinction and collectively recognize that our mental freedom is at stake. Only then can we reclaim a world in which humans find meaning and flourish.

Deeply felt and rigorously researched, COGNITIVE EXTINCTION is a clarion call for all of us to pay attention to what we’re losing―while we can still feel ourselves losing it.

“This may be the most important book written about technology, human flourishing, and what we need to protect to become fully ourselves.” ―Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Nita Farahany is a legal scholar and philosopher who studies the societal implications of emerging technologies. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and the founding director of Duke Science & Society. She is a frequent speaker at events including TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the World Economic Forum. Her previous book, The Battle for Your Brain, has shaped global conversations on cognitive liberty and mental privacy.

THREAT ACTORS de Mitch Moxley et Johnny Liesman

A quarter-billion-dollar crypto heist, a violent kidnapping, a network of teenage cybercriminals, and the rise of the Gen Z Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS
by Mitch Moxley & Johnny Liesman
Random House, Fall 2028
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Not too long ago, responsible adults worried that adolescents who spent hours playing video games like Grand Theft Auto were being indoctrinated into a world numbed to violence and misogyny. What flew under the radar were the late-night sessions on less violent multiplayer games like Minecraft and Roblox that primed kids for something just as unsettling. There, kids could learn to cheat, hack, and steal in online marketplaces selling “rare” usernames and game add-ons, earning an “education” that seamlessly propelled them into the higherstakes cryptocurrency world and hijacking digital wallets—sometimes in a matter of seconds. Threat Actors follows one such group of young men as they graduate from scripted phone scams into threats and beatings, and from “small” seven-figure thefts to the heist of a quarter billion dollars from an unsuspecting middle-aged investor. They are members of “the Com,” or “the Community,” a fast-growing online collective of young criminals trained at home and emerging as a brutal and organized 21st-century Mafia.

THREAT ACTORS (a term used by law enforcement and investigators to describe this growing class of cybercriminals) follows the group’s most notorious crime down every rabbit hole, revealing who the “threat actors” behind the senseless usernames are, examining how an anonymous young investigator on X helped the FBI unravel the mystery of their identities, and asking who’s really to blame for the conditions that guided them down the path to crime.

Mitch Moxley is a writer who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications. He is the co-creator, writer, and host of the podcast Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe (Audible Originals, October 2026), and author of the memoir Apologies to My Censor, about the six years he lived in China.

Johnny Liesman is a New York-based investigative journalist and producer who codeveloped and reported the Audible Originals series Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe and is producing an upcoming podcast hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow. He’s spent countless late nights in the Telegram channels of the Com—and grew up in the same online world as many of the book’s subjects.