Nature reviewed four 2026 book releases addressing oceanography, forest conservation, psychology, and artificial intelligence. The selected titles survey human efforts to explore complex natural environments alongside the historical development of cognitive science.
Biologist Jeffrey Marlow published The Dark Frontier through Random House to examine the planet's least-explored habitat. The deep ocean starts at roughly 200 metres below the surface, where sunlight no longer penetrates the water. Marlow notes that this zone makes up more than 95% of Earth's habitable space. Researchers have observed less than 0.001% of the seabed and an even smaller share of the overlying water column. His book charts the ocean's function in sustaining global life and human civilization while warning that pollution damages these environments before researchers can study them.
Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard detailed her conservation research in When the Forest Breathes, published by Knopf. Simard launched the federally funded Mother Tree Project in British Columbia in 2015. Her team partnered with local Indigenous communities to plant 225,000 trees across a territory spanning an area as large as Denmark. The work covers both the rugged interior of the province and west coast rainforests. Simard designed the effort to record how clearcut logging alters carbon pools and biodiversity while testing alternative forestry management practices.
Historian Antonio Melechi surveyed the study of human cognition in The Unconscious, released by MIT Press. Melechi focuses on historical debates surrounding mental processes, gathering writing from ancient Greek physician Hippocrates to Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. He excluded biophysicist Francis Crick's 1994 consciousness study, The Astonishing Hypothesis, from the volume.
Princeton University Press published Valerie Tiberius's 2026 volume, Artificially Yours. Nature provided no descriptive summary for the title alongside the listing. The journal noted that the review author declared no competing interests.
