Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Rocket Science
When Zhang Chenxing, who holds a PhD from MIT, co-founded Mega Engine Technology in Xi'an in early 2024, China's high-pressure oxygen-rich staged-combustion know-how sat almost entirely inside state propulsion houses — and by May 2026 his startup had logged 1,000 seconds of accumulated test time on a closed-cycle kerolox engine
Constellations
The leading explanation for how the Moon was born is that a world the size of Mars called Theia slammed into the young Earth and flung out the debris that became the Moon, and recent research suggests Theia itself never fully left, with two continent-sized blobs buried near our planet's core possibly being the last remains of the world that struck us.
Science
Earth's magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, swapping magnetic north and south in a switch locked into ancient rock, and it happens on no fixed schedule, yet nothing in the record suggests a single flip ever wiped out life.
Earth Observation
Zealandia, the submerged continent geologists confirmed in 2017, is 94 percent underwater and stretches nearly two million square miles beneath the South Pacific, yet its modern name was quietly proposed by geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk in 1995
Earth Observation
New Zealand and New Caledonia are the only large fragments of Zealandia still poking above the ocean, meaning the country most travellers think of as a pair of islands is actually the exposed mountain peaks of a continent five times their size.
Science
A rainbow is not actually located in any specific place in the sky — every person watching the same rainbow is seeing a slightly different one, formed by different raindrops, and if two people stood next to each other looking at the same rainbow, the rainbows they are seeing would be technically different, with no two viewers in the world ever sharing the exact same rainbow
Earth Observation
A team led by Nick Mortimer at GNS Science in New Zealand spent two decades mapping the basalt and granite floor of the Tasman region before formally naming Zealandia in a 2017 paper, ending more than a century of arguments about whether a submerged landmass could still count as a continent.
Constellations
The Moon is stealing time from the Earth, and it has been getting away with it for billions of years. Our planet spins so much slower than it once did that a single day has stretched from just 19 hours to the 24 we live by, and the Moon is still creeping away from us right now.
Science
There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way. A major global estimate put the planet’s tree count at about three trillion, while NASA gives the Milky Way’s star count as roughly 100 to 400 billion.
Science
The bootprints left by the Apollo astronauts will still be sitting on the Moon a million years from now, because there is no wind and no rain to wear them away.
Science
Tyrannosaurus rex lived so much closer in time to the first humans than it did to Stegosaurus that the gap separating the two most famous dinosaurs is actually wider than the gap between T. rex and us.
Constellations
Venus spins so slowly that one rotation takes longer than its entire year. A Venusian day is about 243 Earth days, while a Venusian year lasts about 225 — and because the planet rotates backwards compared with Earth and most other planets, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east.
Human Behaviour
The 1518 dancing plague of Strasbourg began when Frau Troffea stepped into the street and danced without stopping, drew as many as 400 townspeople into the mania, and later chronicles claimed some died before it ended on its own
Human Behaviour
The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland has seen hundreds of dogs leap from the same parapet since the 1950s, often on clear days from the right side, and one behavioural investigation pointed to the scent of mink below
Science