Mind & Meaning
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
There is a region of space called the Boötes void, around 330 million light years wide and almost completely empty, and if our galaxy sat at its centre, we might not have discovered that other galaxies existed until well into the twentieth century.
Mind & Meaning
The Great Pyramid of Giza is described as one of the world's oldest landmarks, but it was already more than a thousand years old by the time Stonehenge was completed — and it was older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us, with the gap between her reign and the pyramid's construction larger than the gap between her reign and the present day
Human Behaviour
The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its 30,000 tablets were made of clay, the fire actually baked and preserved them, and we can read Mesopotamian poetry today because someone tried to destroy it
Human Behaviour
Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized crime scenes with hand-stitched curtains and working light bulbs to train homicide detectives, and 18 of her tiny dioramas are still used in forensic training in Baltimore today
Science
The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the next 1,400 years
Constellations
In the year 1054 a star exploded so brightly that Chinese astronomers recorded it shining in broad daylight for more than three weeks, and the wreckage of that blast is still expanding across the sky today as the Crab Nebula.
Constellations
The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees hotter, and after decades of work physicists still cannot fully explain how the cooler layer heats the one above it.
Constellations
Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.
Science
More than 2,200 years ago a librarian in Egypt measured the circumference of the entire planet using nothing but a stick, a shadow, and the distance between two cities, and landed within a few per cent of the right answer.
Science
Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador sits farther from the centre of the planet, making it the closest piece of land on Earth to outer space.
Science
Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out — and when Atlantic water finally broke back in near Gibraltar, one model suggests the basin may have refilled so violently that sea level rose by metres a day.
Asia News
There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring residents to sort their household waste into 45 separate categories and achieving an 81 per cent recycling rate against a national average of 20 per cent.
Deep Space
NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100,000 new transiting planets in just five years — along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit
Black Holes
The James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the first direct measurement of a black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting in an ancient galaxy where it outweighs every star around it — suggesting it may have formed first
Science