Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 608 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
Washington tried to blind the world to what's happening over Iran — and instead handed Europe's satellite industry the customer base it spent a decade failing to build
Science
The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth at a gravitational balance point so precarious it has to fire its thrusters every three weeks just to stay there, and when its fuel runs out around 2040 it will drift away forever with no possibility of refueling or rescue.
Cosmology
The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that appear to have formed within 280 million years of the Big Bang, some containing heavy elements that shouldn't have had time to form — and at least one peer-reviewed paper has now proposed that the universe might actually be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice the standard estimate
Human Behaviour
Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon
Human Behaviour
Women's sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men's on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus
Human Behaviour
The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.
Human Behaviour
Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all
Human Behaviour
Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song
Tech Space
The Opportunity rover survived on Mars for 14 years — roughly 55 times longer than its 90-day design mission — before a 2018 global dust storm so vast it turned "day into night" across the entire planet buried its solar panels, and despite NASA sending more than 1,000 recovery commands afterward, the rover never woke up
Human Behaviour
Siberian, Amazonian, and Aboriginal Australian shamanic traditions developed independently across three continents — and all three describe the same basic cosmology of an upper world, a middle world, and a lower world reached through an axis at the centre
Cosmology
Every breath you take contains atoms that were once inside the lungs of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and every other person who has ever lived — the math is unforgiving and it works out every time
Psychology
Submarine crews and astronauts experience the same set of psychological pressures and have evolved opposite ways of handling them, and the difference reveals something about how isolation actually works.
Space Industry
Norway's sovereign wealth fund — built entirely from oil revenue — is now the single largest investor in the global energy transition, and it owns roughly 1.5% of every publicly traded company on Earth
Solar Science
The water in your coffee this morning is older than the Sun, formed in interstellar clouds before the solar system existed, and roughly half of every glass of water on Earth predates the planet it's sitting on by about a billion years.
Deep Space