Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 666 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Most of the matter in the universe has never been observed directly, and the existence of "dark matter" is essentially a placeholder name for the gap between what we can see and what the math requires — a placeholder we've been using confidently for about ninety years
Science
The human eye has a small blind spot where the optic nerve connects to the retina, and the only reason you don't constantly see a hole in your visual field is that your brain is filling it in with educated guesses — meaning every moment of your visual experience is partly fabrication, and your conscious mind is the last to be informed.
Mind & Meaning
Most of what we call "memory" isn't a recording of what happened — it's a reconstruction that gets edited slightly every time it's retrieved — meaning the more you remember something, the further it drifts from what actually occurred, and the most vivid memories of your life are often the least accurate
Deep Space
The fastest object ever built by humans is the Parker Solar Probe, currently flying through the Sun's outer atmosphere at 430,000 miles per hour — fast enough to travel from Philadelphia to Washington in about a second — protected from 2,500-degree temperatures by a heat shield about four and a half inches thick that NASA engineers spent two decades figuring out how to make.
Mind & Meaning
There's a real, measurable cognitive trait called "intellectual humility" that turns out to predict accuracy on almost every kind of judgment task — and the people who score highest on it aren't the ones who know the most, they're the ones who hold their existing beliefs slightly more loosely than everyone around them
Mind & Meaning
The single oldest non-clonal living thing on Earth is a bristlecone pine called Methuselah, growing on a windswept slope in California's White Mountains at 9,800 feet — it germinated around 2833 BCE, which means it was already a thousand years old when the Egyptians were finishing the Pyramids, and the U.S. Forest Service refuses to disclose its exact location for fear of what tourists would do to it
Mind & Meaning
Most professional mathematicians, when describing the moment a difficult proof finally falls into place, use language closer to discovery than to invention — and the consistency of that framing across cultures and centuries has driven philosophers of mathematics to a serious unresolved question about whether mathematical structures exist independently of the minds that find them
Culture
The earliest known cave paintings, recently dated to at least 45,500 years old on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, depict a wild pig and several human-animal hybrid figures — and the discovery has pushed the timeline of complex symbolic thinking back so far that most of the standard textbook narratives about when humans started being recognizably modern are now being quietly rewritten
Psychology
AI can now read your emotional state in a shop, adapt what it shows you in real time, and increase sales by double digits — and most shoppers have no idea this is already happening
Constellations
Europe and China just put a telescope in orbit to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield keeping the solar wind from stripping Earth bare
Science
The Arecibo radio telescope broadcast a single 3-minute message toward star cluster M13 in 1974, and because M13 is 25,000 light-years away, any reply would take 50,000 years to arrive, meaning the people who sent it knew with certainty no one alive would ever hear an answer.
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