Psychology
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
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
In 1908 something exploded over a remote part of Siberia with the force of roughly 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, flattened 80 million trees, and was heard 600 miles away — and more than a century later, scientists still cannot fully agree on whether it was an asteroid, a comet, or something else entirely
Constellations
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
Science
Every GPS satellite is launched with a clock deliberately set to run slow, because Einstein's relativity speeds it up by about 38 microseconds a day once in orbit — and without that built-in correction, your phone's location would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.
Constellations
Olympus Mons on Mars is a volcano more than two and a half times the height of Everest, but its slopes rise so gradually over hundreds of kilometres that a person standing on it might not realize they were on the tallest volcano in the solar system at all.
Science
French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground
Science
Helium was discovered on the Sun 27 years before anyone found it on Earth — spotted as an unexplained yellow line in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse and named after Helios, the Greek sun god, long before the gas was identified in any mineral on this planet.
Constellations
In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
Constellations
Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded
Psychology
Almost half of women in their 60s and 70s in Japan now prefer getting personal advice from AI rather than another human — the only age group in the survey to make that choice — and the country's elderly isolation crisis is the unstated context
Space Travel