Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 591 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
The Milky Way's central black hole is almost silent today, but a collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud could feed it enough gas to wake it up — roughly two billion years from now
Deep Space
The James Webb Space Telescope has just spotted a doomed star 40 million light-years away — wrapped in a dust shroud so thick it was invisible to Hubble — and the discovery may finally explain why the biggest stars in the universe keep vanishing before they explode
Science
Adding a banana to a berry smoothie can cancel out roughly 84% of the antioxidants the berries were supposed to deliver — and the reason is the same enzyme that turns bananas brown after they're peeled
Space Industry
A drilling expedition off Nantucket has confirmed a massive freshwater reservoir buried beneath the Atlantic seafloor — stretching from New Jersey to Maine, hypothesized since the 1960s, and holding enough drinkable water to supply New York City for roughly 800 years
Science
The paper that explained why every living thing on Earth exists was rejected by 15 journals before anyone took it seriously — and the idea it contained is stranger than most science fiction
Space Industry
A genuine "once in a blue moon" event arrives this Sunday, May 31 — the only monthly Blue Moon between now and the very end of 2028 — and this one will pass right next to the bright orange heart of Scorpius in the predawn sky
Deep Space
A space telescope orbiting Earth just picked up the same strange signature buried in every kind of cosmic ray it can detect — and it's a fingerprint physicists have been quietly waiting on since 1912
Science
A research vessel mapping the Mediterranean floor off the coast of Sicily has just uncovered something the existing maps of the region don't show — and it's been sitting there, just kilometers from one of the most populated coastlines in Europe, the whole time.
Human Behaviour
The human body replaces almost all of its cells over a roughly 7-10 year period — but the neurons in your cerebral cortex are almost certainly the same age as you are
Mind & Meaning
Microsoft built an anechoic chamber so quiet that the background noise drops below the threshold of human hearing, and nobody has been able to sit inside it for more than 45 minutes because the brain begins to hallucinate when the only sounds left are your own heartbeat and lungs
Constellations
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
Mars Daily
The Opportunity rover's famous last words — "my battery is low and it's getting dark" — were never actually sent from Mars. The real story of where that sentence came from is stranger, and somehow sadder
Aerospace
In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — but he did not land inside Vostok 1. He ejected and parachuted to Earth separately, and Soviet officials omitted that fact from official records because aviation record rules required the pilot to land with the craft
Science
When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.
Climate Science