Alice Roberts

Alice Roberts: 'We are fundamentally, at the end of the day, animals'

Physically, Homo sapiens is not that special in the animal world. But the species has discovered ways of finding food and beating the odds of survival in every habitat from jungle to Arctic wasteland. It has also come to obsess Alice Roberts, who started off in medicine, becoming a surgeon and an anatomist.

The best new popular science books of June 2026

This is a month to look out for some powerful new books, with authors taking on challenges of all sorts and imagining whole new worlds. There are fresh ways to think about a cancer diagnosis, a book tackling the real inner world of hormones, in which we are all hormonal all the time, plus a major re-envisioning of the natural world where we abandon the shallows of competition for the depth and intricacies of connection and togetherness. Welcome to the symbiocene.

Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

A woman interred in Scotland 2000 years ago has peculiar scrape marks inside her skull, which suggest that removing the brain after death may have been a funeral tradition in Iron Age Britain. The funerary practices in Iron Age Britain – which ran from about 800 BC until the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 – and the Iron Age more generally are mysterious because human remains from that long ago rarely survive. We do know that some people from this time tended to be buried alongside their...

Stonehenge's altar stone probably wasn't transported by a glacier

Researchers investigating the origins of Stonehenge’s enigmatic altar stone say it is possible that the 6-tonne rock was carried southwards from Scotland by a glacier – but this hypothesis relies on an unlikely series of events, making it more likely that humans transported it. The 5-metre-long monolith, which is partially buried and overlain by two other stones, has been in its present location, at the centre of Stonehenge’s ring of worked boulders, for around 4500 years. In 2024,...

Scientists mapped every neural connection in a fruit fly and found a surprise

Doctors thought this kidney drug helped some patients. It may help millions more.

Doctors thought this kidney drug helped some patients. It may help millions more. - Date: - June 8, 2026

Bronze statue immortalises Aboriginal leader Lowitja O'Donoghue

Influential Aboriginal leader Lowitja O'Donoghue immortalised in new bronze statue Wed 3 Jun 2026 at 2:27pm In short: A bronze statue of Lowitja O'Donoghue, one of Australia's most influential Aboriginal leaders, has been unveiled in Adelaide. South Australian artist Robert Hannaford created the statue. The statue is the first of an initial six of prominent Aboriginal South Australians that the state government has planned.

The Surprising, Liberating History of Marriage

A few months ago, one of my best friends told me that she and her boyfriend had gotten engaged. She has two young kids and has never been married; he’s older; they each have their own apartment; she seemed happy with the way things were. I said, because he’s a good person, and I love my friend.