Human Behaviour
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 666 articles · Back to full archive
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
The supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has a mass of 4 million suns, and the entire solar system is orbiting it at 514,000 mph without anyone on Earth feeling a thing
Science
Roughly two billion years ago, one single-celled organism swallowed another and instead of digesting it, ended up living with it permanently inside — and the bacterium that almost became a meal became the mitochondria that now power nearly every cell in nearly every plant and animal on Earth, still carrying a small remnant of their own ancient bacterial DNA, separate from ours.
Human Behaviour
Cows have best friends, get visibly stressed when separated from them, and have measurably lower heart rates when reunited — and the dairy industry has known this since at least 2011
Constellations
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, Michael Collins orbited above them alone in Columbia — and for roughly 47 minutes of each orbit, when the body of the Moon itself blocked radio contact with both Earth and the lunar surface, he was a single human being with the entire Moon between himself and every other living person
Culture
There's a version of astrology a scientist can honestly engage with — not the planetary-influence version, which has been repeatedly falsified, but the human-psychology version, which is the real reason horoscopes work, the real reason birth charts feel uncanny, and the real reason this practice has outlived nearly every empire that ever banned it
Aerospace