Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 678 articles · Back to full archive
Aerospace
The Arecibo message — humanity’s most famous deliberate radio message to another civilization — was aimed at a star cluster about 25,000 light-years away in 1974, meaning even an immediate reply would not reach Earth until around 52,000 CE
Science
In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing
Science
The tallest known living thing on Earth is a coastal redwood named Hyperion that stands 380 feet tall in a hidden grove in California, and its exact location is kept secret by the National Park Service because the last time tourists found a record-holding redwood they trampled its root system so badly the tree began dying.
Psychology
Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot photograph was nearly never taken — Carl Sagan pushed NASA to turn the camera back toward Earth after the planetary mission was over, while engineers worried the Sun’s glare could damage the optics
Space Industry
SPHEREx more than doubled the confirmed population of heavily reddened quasars at cosmic noon — and the new sample may catch supermassive black holes as they begin clearing the dust around them
Human Behaviour
Human creativity may have been forged by hardship rather than abundance — according to a new study of 146,000-year-old stone tools found in central China and dated to one of the harshest Ice Ages of early human history
Psychology
Evidence of ancient life has just been found buried inside an asteroid crater — and the discovery suggests the warm lakes created by major impacts may have been some of the original cradles of life on Earth
Aerospace
Many astronauts describe a quiet realization when they look down at Earth from orbit — that the borders and political lines we treat as permanent are invisible from above
Psychology
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
Mind & Meaning
Astrophysicists have a quiet ranking of Hollywood's space movies — and the films they consider most accurate aren't always the ones audiences remember as realistic
Deep Space
NASA is building a nuclear reactor for the Moon by 2030 — and testing the nuclear propulsion that could carry humans to Mars in the decade after — under a new directive that revives a space-nuclear ambition the agency has been quietly chasing since Apollo
Deep Space
Scientists think they may have found the remains of an entire galaxy that the Milky Way absorbed billions of years ago — 20 unusual stars hiding inside our own galactic disk, possibly the leftovers of a small galaxy our own home swallowed when it was still young
Mind & Meaning
In 1518 in Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and began to dance, and within a month roughly 400 people were dancing alongside her — some of them, according to later accounts, until they collapsed and died — and no one has ever fully explained why
Moon Daily
Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the surface of the Moon using a tiny kit he carried aboard with NASA's quiet blessing, pouring wine that curled slowly upward in one-sixth gravity — and NASA then asked him to keep it off the air to avoid inflaming a lawsuit already underway over a Bible reading from orbit
Earth News