Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 667 articles · Back to full archive
Space Industry
Scientists have spent decades searching for alien life by identifying specific molecules — a new study suggests that was never going to be enough on its own, and what they were missing was hiding in plain sight
Constellations
Voyager 2 photographed Neptune in light so dim that some exposures lasted seconds or even minutes, while the spacecraft was racing past the planet. To stop the images smearing, engineers programmed the spacecraft itself to compensate for the motion, turning the whole probe into its own image-stabilisation system.
Mind & Meaning
Modern retirement was invented in 1889 by a 74-year-old German Chancellor named Otto von Bismarck, who set the eligible age at 70 in a country where the average male life expectancy at birth was around 40
Constellations
The Huygens probe descended by parachute to the surface of Titan in 2005, through an orange haze colder than minus 170 degrees Celsius, and more than a billion kilometres from home it remains the only spacecraft humanity has ever landed anywhere in the outer solar system
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million to send a second rover to the Moon — and the real bet isn't on exploration, it's on becoming the construction crew that arrives before the astronauts do
Constellations
The Soviet Lunokhod 1 rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, then scientists found its lost reflector in 2010 and got a signal bright enough to reopen a forgotten corner of lunar science
Constellations
JWST just mapped the morning weather on a planet 690 light-years away, and the forecast of sand-like clouds exposed a 100-fold bias in how exoplanet atmospheres have been read for more than a decade
Mind & Meaning
Dante imagined a catastrophic planetary impact in striking geological detail 500 years before science understood how asteroids work — and it took a researcher reading the Inferno to notice
Human Behaviour
Apple just rolled out hearing tests on AirPods Pro and hypertension alerts on Apple Watch to a new wave of countries — including India, Italy, and Taiwan — putting clinical-grade health screening in the pockets of users in more than 160 countries around the world
Science
The third-largest Ebola outbreak on record is spreading through DRC and Uganda — and aid workers, former USAID officials, and global health experts say recent US funding cuts have made detection and response significantly harder
Science
A new species of mosasaur named Tylosaurus rex — twice the length of a great white shark, with finely serrated teeth and evidence of violent combat against its own kind — has just been identified from 80-million-year-old Texas fossils that had been sitting in museums for decades
Constellations
In 1970 a Soviet probe became the first object ever to transmit from the surface of another planet, and it lasted barely 23 minutes on Venus before the heat killed it
Constellations
Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury are lining up in the western sky after sunset this week — and a Blue Moon is sliding past Antares — in a run of evening sky events that won't be matched again for years
Constellations
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched before Google, before the smartphone era, and before digital cameras became normal, and NASA engineers have now reconfigured it to keep observing the universe on a single working gyroscope after 35 years aloft.
Science