The best new popular science books of April 2026

Many insects have lived in close symbiosis with bacteria for millions of years, during which time the bacteria have provided them with vital nutrients, making the mutualistic relationship so close that neither partner can survive without the other. However, the mechanisms and reasons behind the occasional exchange of symbionts during evolution have remained unclear until now.

Superb fairy-wrens are facing "imminent danger," and a well-studied population in Canberra could go extinct in the next 30 years if we don't urgently curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to an international team of scientists including researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), James Cook University (JCU) and Hainan University. Their comprehensive, decades-long study published in Nature Communications has tracked a population of fairy-wrens at the Australian National Botanic

Experiments conducted in Brazil using laboratory rats have shown that graphene-based structures can act as a powerful ally in bone regeneration. These structures are made of sheets of the chemical element carbon that are just one atom thick. They can help heal fractures or bone loss. In the tests, the biocompatible matrix containing graphene facilitated nearly 90% repair of the damage sustained by the test subjects one month after the fracture was induced in the laboratory—a superior performance

Quantum computers of the future may be closer to reality thanks to new research from Caltech and Oratomic, a Caltech-linked start-up company. Theorists and experimentalists teamed up to develop a new approach for reducing the errors that riddle today's rudimentary quantum computers. Whereas these machines were previously thought to require millions of qubits to work properly (qubits being the quantum equivalent to 1's and 0's in classical computers), the new results indicate that a fully realize