Books
Zoe Kean and Tegan Taylor (eds)
The Best Australian Science Writing 2025
If ever there were a time to resurrect science journalism, it is now. Between artificial intelligence, the soaring misuse of toxic chemicals, the distractions of noise and light pollution, the growth of satellite clutter in the skies, the alarming manipulation of genetics and so much more, it’s getting harder to simply shrug because we don’t understand it.
The Best Australian Science Writing 2025 is in its 15th iteration. This year it’s edited by journalists Zoe Kean and Tegan Taylor and tackles many pressing contemporary subjects in 39 reprinted articles by science journalists from across the country. Topics range from the merely curious to the politically and environmentally pressing. Could borderline personality disorder be a form of PTSD? Researchers into cetacean acoustic exchanges doubt whether we’ll ever be able to communicate with whales, but let’s wait and see. Why is it so hard to establish the death toll in Gaza? Why can’t we remember our lives as babies or toddlers? Can we immunise society against misinformation?
Some make us work hard, and it’s worth it. Sara Webb, for example, looks at the subject of gravitational waves. It’s hard to remember now that Albert Einstein didn’t believe in black holes. Without black holes, we couldn’t have imagined gravitational waves, let alone have found them in 2015. Now we can finally hear the faint but constant background noise of pulsars, kind of.
Other pieces make us rethink the bleeding obvious. I didn’t realise – or did I just forget? – how recently air-conditioning became the norm. In 1999, only 35 per cent of Australian homes had it. By 2010, that was 70 per cent. Now, in hot and humid Brisbane, it accounts for 90 per cent of household electricity use during peak times. James Purtill shows how that has changed our way of life and explains how the Global Cooling Pledge is working to reduce emissions from it.
Speaking of emissions, how far ahead is China in the race for fusion energy, a potential source of limitless clean energy? It is now spending roughly $1.5 billion on the research, Gemma Conroy tells us, twice what the fossil-fuel-beholden United States does. The Chinese government, unlike America’s, has a green agenda. Amalyah Hart, meanwhile, differentiates between “cognitive” consciousness, which lets us process information and solve problems, and “phenomenal” consciousness, which provides the subjective experience of pain, colour, taste and more, in insect brain research. That leads, by the bye, to intriguing questions about the ethics of animal-human interaction.
Forget AI. There is so much reality to explore.
NewSouth, 252pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "The Best Australian Science Writing 2025".
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