Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 666 articles · Back to full archive
Deep Space
Saturn's rings are mostly made of water ice, and they're slowly raining down into the planet at a rate that means they'll be gone in roughly 100 million years — which sounds geologically long, but in the timeline of the solar system it means we're seeing them during one specific moment of their existence, and almost any other moment we could have been born into would have seen Saturn without them
Earth Observation
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in Europe, revealing a grim paradox: removing humans from the landscape did far more for the animals than a nuclear disaster did to harm them
Internet Space
China installed more solar capacity in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history, and the panels were largely manufactured using coal-fired electricity
Human Behaviour
Humans share roughly 60 percent of our genes with a banana — and the framing makes for good party trivia, but the more interesting fact is what it actually means: that nearly all the basic machinery for being a living thing was settled long before our lineage and the banana's parted ways, and most of what makes any of us recognizable is the small remaining percentage we don't share.
Climate Science
The ozone layer is the only major environmental crisis humanity has actually solved, and it happened because the chemical industry quietly realised the replacement refrigerants were more profitable than the ones being banned
Stellar Chemistry
The Voyager probes carry golden records etched with greetings in 55 languages, whale songs, and a woman's brainwaves recorded while she thought about being in love, and the records are designed to remain playable for one billion years drifting through interstellar space.
Space Industry
The Soviet naval officer who refused to fire his nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis is the reason most people alive today exist — and almost no one in the West knew his name until 2002
Constellations
A quantum flicker measured in centimeters and nanoseconds may be the hidden switch deciding whether a dying star explodes into a supernova or simply collapses in silence
Constellations
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because its fuel was running low and engineers refused to risk it drifting into Enceladus, a moon with a subsurface ocean, and the final 22 orbits were designed to thread a 1,500-mile gap between Saturn and its innermost ring that no spacecraft had ever attempted.
Psychology
Sleeping with a pet can feel comforting, but it does not reveal a person's relationships
Psychology
Nobody tells you that the most important relationship you'll have in midlife is the one with the version of yourself you were 25 — and the work of going back, apologizing to her, and thanking her for getting you here is something the rest of your adult life is going to be quietly built around
Psychology
There's a particular freedom that arrives the first time you say no to something you would have said yes to a decade ago — and the freedom isn't from the no itself, it's from the realization that the yes was costing you something you finally have the language to name
Human Behaviour
For the first time in human history, most people live under skies they cannot see — and the psychological consequence of having lost the night sky has barely begun to be measured.
Psychology
There's a particular kind of peace that arrives in your 60s and 70s when you finally stop trying to be understood by people who haven't been listening — and the peace isn't sad, it's the structural truth of someone who has stopped negotiating with audiences that weren't going to give her what she was asking for
Aerospace