Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 639 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Most people who say they want to be alone are not actually wanting solitude but a particular kind of presence around them that does not require them to perform
Culture
The cosmos is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we're in it — and almost no film has ever captured that real texture of space the way Stanley Kubrick captured it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is why astronauts and astrophysicists keep returning to it nearly sixty years after its release
Science
The deepest part of the human gut contains a peripheral nervous system of about 500 million neurons — more than the spinal cord — operating with enough independence that researchers sometimes call it the "second brain," and the body's emotional responses are frequently well underway in the gut before the conscious mind has been informed about whatever it is responding to
Mind & Meaning
Nobody talks about why public enthusiasm for space collapsed at almost exactly the same moment that two billionaires became its most visible faces
Deep Space
The Earth's magnetic field has reversed itself completely roughly 183 times in the last 83 million years — the last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago — and during the transition the field's strength drops to a small fraction of normal, leaves the planet briefly more exposed to solar radiation, and creates auroras at latitudes where they otherwise never appear.
Science
The most accurate atomic clocks in operation now lose less than one second every 30 billion years — and the reason this matters isn't precision for its own sake, it's that gravity itself slows time slightly, and these clocks are now sensitive enough to measure the difference between sitting on the floor and standing upright in the same room.
Psychology
People who are genuinely kind but feel virtually alone in the world have usually figured out something most adults haven't admitted yet — that being warm to everyone is not the same as being known by anyone, and the small daily difference between the two adds up across decades
Constellations
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity completed 72 flights in an atmosphere less than one percent as dense as Earth's before rotor blade damage grounded it in 2024, and JPL had originally designed it for just five test flights, and the lessons from its overperformance are shaping NASA's next generation of Mars aircraft
Constellations
Richard Nixon's White House had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface, and the speech written by William Safire begins "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," and the contingency plan had NASA ending communications with the lunar module, leaving Michael Collins as the only Apollo 11 astronaut able to return to Earth.
Constellations
Astronauts who walked on the moon reported that the dust tracked back into the lunar module smelled like spent gunpowder, and more than fifty years later scientists still cannot fully explain why, though the leading theory involves regolith that had sat undisturbed in vacuum for four billion years suddenly meeting oxygen and moisture inside the cabin for the first time.
Science
The Mars rovers carry no clocks set to Earth time, so the engineers driving them shifted their entire lives to a 24-hour-39-minute Martian day, and within weeks JPL staff were sleeping during California afternoons, eating breakfast at midnight, and quietly developing a kind of jet lag no human had experienced before.
Military Space
There is a single satellite launched by the US Navy in 1964 that is still in orbit, still transmitting, and still being used by amateur radio operators around the world — and nobody at the Navy has been in charge of it for decades
Constellations
The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA's job is beating China to the moon — and the 46-43 vote tells you everything about what the agency is becoming
Cosmology
Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn't fully reverse
Science