Human Behaviour
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 667 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Astronaut Chris Hadfield says confidence on the ISS didn't come from optimism — it came from what he calls the power of negative thinking, the practice of working out your most likely failure points before you start
Constellations
The satellite industry is betting on multi-orbit resilience, but a San Francisco startup says the real future may be switching between LEO networks instead
Constellations
The FCC just gave Lynk and Anterix a small 900 MHz test from orbit, and it could redraw how utility networks reach remote America
Climate Science
The Parker Solar Probe is still flying through the Sun's corona at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in about 20 seconds, because a 4.5-inch carbon-foam shield keeps the spacecraft in the shade
Constellations
The Hubble Space Telescope's main mirror was ground to the wrong shape by 2.2 micrometers, about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, and the error was only caught after launch because the device used to verify the mirror on the ground had itself been built wrong
Constellations
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were found to be decelerating slightly more than gravity could explain, and for thirty years physicists wondered if Newton was wrong before realizing in 2012 that the answer was the probes' own waste heat gently pushing them backward at a billionth of Earth's gravity.
Human Behaviour
The Sumerians wrote down complaints, love letters, lullabies, and arguments about the price of copper on clay tablets 4,000 years ago — and the things they were worried about are almost indistinguishable from the things people post online today
Cosmology
There is a cloud of alcohol drifting through the constellation Aquila that is 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system and contains enough ethanol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer — and nobody has any commercial way to reach it, which is probably for the best
Science
When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA — meaning a human group whose physical traces vanished around 40,000 years ago still survives, in fragments, inside the cells of billions of people alive today
Human Behaviour
Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world's most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet's largest desert thousands of miles away.
Psychology
NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on Mars that may be billions of years old — and the scientists studying them are being careful about what they say next
Constellations
A comet drifted alone between the stars for up to 11 billion years before entering our solar system last year — and the water inside it is unlike anything scientists have ever seen in our own
Human Behaviour
Interstellar's most-discussed scene is treated as exotic science fiction, but the family-separation problem it dramatises is one of the more actively studied subjects in long-duration mission planning.
Science
A few rocks spotted near a pond in northeastern Thailand in 2016 have just been confirmed as a 27-tonne, 27-metre sauropod — the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia
Human Behaviour