Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Science
For 70 years, two large fossil bones sat in a University of Alaska museum drawer labeled as woolly mammoth — until radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and DNA testing revealed they came from two whales of two different species that somehow ended up 250 miles inland from the nearest coast, in a mystery the researchers say may never be fully solved
Science
The reason the TV helps you sleep is simpler than most people think — it's quietly masking the small environmental sounds that would otherwise wake you up, and almost any steady background sound would do the same thing
Science
A pair of American satellites built to catch the Soviets cheating on a nuclear test ban kept detecting unexplained flashes, and the flashes turned out to be the most powerful explosions in the universe coming from billions of light-years away
Constellations
In 1987 a star exploded in a nearby galaxy, and detectors deep underground caught the burst of neutrinos roughly three hours before any telescope on Earth saw the light arrive.
Science
A remarkable new study suggests pigeons may navigate using their liver — solving a decades-long mystery about how birds find their way home across hundreds of miles by pointing to an organ no one had been looking at
Earth News
The Aztecs built an agricultural system in the 14th century that produced seven harvests a year without synthetic fertiliser, irrigation pipes, or chemical inputs, fed a city of 200,000 people for two centuries, was destroyed by Spanish conquest in 1521, and is now being painstakingly rebuilt by farmers and scientists in the only part of it that survived.
Psychology
We have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn't from doing too much, it's from never once letting the mind go quiet
Human Behaviour
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most important work
Human Behaviour
Sam Altman said he was 'pretty wrong' about the jobs apocalypse — and 'roughly right' about everything else — four days after OpenAI filed for a trillion-dollar IPO
Tech Space
Brussels just quietly carved out two-thirds of a key satellite band for European operators, and the move is really a direct shot at Starlink's phone-to-satellite ambitions
Constellations
New evidence suggests Saturn's rings are younger than the dinosaurs — and for most of the planet's history, the Saturn you picture may never have existed
Science
A single aspen grove in Utah called Pando is one organism sharing a 106-acre root system and 47,000 genetically identical trunks, weighs roughly 6,000 tons, and has been quietly cloning itself for somewhere between 9,000 and 80,000 years while every visible trunk above it lives and dies on a 130-year cycle.
Space Travel
In 1965, a 30-year-old cosmonaut named Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space — and somewhere in the middle of the live broadcast, while the world was watching the Soviet Union's greatest propaganda triumph, mission control quietly cut the feed, for reasons that wouldn't be publicly known for almost thirty years
Nuclear Space
The copper canisters Finland chose to seal its nuclear waste are expected by some scientists to begin corroding within centuries — but the engineers buried them anyway at 430 metres, because the 1.9-billion-year-old rock surrounding them was there before complex life existed on Earth
Science