People's Choice Winner 2026

This image was taken in La Palma Island in the Canary Islands, when the horizon, the Milky Way, and the rising moon (not sun!) formed the shape of an eye. La Palma has one of the best night skies in the world, and therefore is home to world-class telescopes, as can be seen in the lower left along the ridge. While these are some of our best "eyes" towards the universe, one always wonders when gazing at the night sky: "Are there any eyes from a star or planet elsewhere in the universe gazing back at us?"

Early encounters with nature help build a lifelong relationship grounded in curiosity, wonder, and belonging. Research shows that time spent in nature during childhood supports mental and physical health whilst also shaping environmental values and a sense of responsibility toward the planet, nature and our climate. In an era of growing environmental challenges, it is increasingly crucial to offer children opportunities to connect with the natural world. These simple outdoor moments nurture future generations who understand, value, and care for nature and recognise the interdependence between people and the environment.

Venus is one of the brightest planets by eye, and is also a strong source of radio emission. Here we are using the 64-metre-diameter Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) in Italy to observe Venus to better understand its atmosphere. The shadows on the telescope surface show how close Venus was to the Sun during the observations, while the staircase running up the side of the telescope highlights the size of the structure. This was part of an international campaign to investigate links between Venusian surface and atmospheric changeability, using SRT alongside other telescopes across the globe, including in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia.

Shot on film at the Lisbon Oceanarium, this image captures a triangular skylight whose layered geometry and gradients of light are reminiscent of the flattening of a high-dimensional object into two dimensions. These triangular shapes resemble lower-dimensional "shadows" of simplices or polytopes, while the variation in illumination suggests a probability density or heat map. A small flaw in the film scan appears as a bright white point near the upper left of the frame, invoking the idea of a point or sample within a probability distribution.

The veins of a skeleton leaf sit beside the folds of discarded plastic film. Although both form interconnected networks, their journeys are very different. In nature, materials are continuously recovered and returned to the cycle of life. Human made materials often escape these cycles, becoming waste instead of resources. My research explores how waste management systems can recover value from discarded materials and keep them circulating within the economy. Nature shows that waste is not inevitable; it is often the result of how systems are designed.

The image shows a bacteria that naturally lives inside a marine sponge off the coast of Japan. The bacteria take 4 months to grow and produce a red pigment that has antibiotic activity. This project is linked to a recently awarded EU Horizon proposal with partners from Norway, Holland, Germany, New Zealand, and Belgium (to be announced and starting 1st September 2026).

One of the world's last wild frontiers is on the frontlines of desertification. In Kharkhorin, livestock roam open pastures atop the ruins of Karakorum — once the centre of the Mongol Empire. Nomadic pastoralism is still widely practiced in the Mongolian steppes where it is deeply embedded in cultural identity. Yet this millennia-old practice is now threatened by climate change and human pressures driving land degradation. Ecosystem restoration initiatives must go beyond biophysical indicators by integrating social and ecological dimensions to ensure that such efforts are not only scientifically sound, but also socially equitable and legitimate.

Light trails on the shadow of a swing, nestled between the offices of Meta and Google DeepMind in Kings Cross, the new epicentre of AI in London, where everyone is in the race to build bigger models. Yet the inner workings of these algorithms remain a mystery, even to their creators. My research seeks to shine a light on neural networks by developing methods to make these “black boxes” more interpretable. Tracing words as they travel through a model, we can see which internal features drive a given output, allowing us to create guardrails that steer the model away from unsafe responses.

A periscope into the underworld of temperate rainforests. This is a Yellowdrop Milkcap mushroom (Lactarius chrysorrheus) in association with an oak root from an Atlantic oakwood in Scotland. The yellow branched structure that’s emerging from the root is neither plant nor fungus, but a hybrid of the two, known as an “ectomycorrhiza”. This is the symbiotic interface where nutrients are exchanged in the ancient partnership between trees and fungi. It takes 3-14 million of these ectomycorrhizas to supply enough nutrients to produce a single mushroom. The length of this ectomycorrhiza is roughly that of the width of a pencil.