Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 591 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Deep beneath Antarctica, researchers drill ice cores filled with tiny bubbles of ancient air, sealed into the ice for hundreds of thousands of years — letting them sample the atmosphere of a world no living human ever breathed.
Science
In 1986, a freshwater lake in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide that killed 1,746 people in a single night, and that lake is one of only three on Earth known to be capable of this, the largest of which sits beneath roughly two million people."
Science
Astronauts come home from long stays on the International Space Station measurably taller, their spines stretching by a few centimetres without gravity to compress them — though the extra height usually disappears soon after they return to Earth.
Aerospace
Carl Sagan's team considered sending a nude photograph of a man and a pregnant woman on the Voyager Golden Record, but after the controversy over the nude Pioneer plaque, the final record used a silhouette instead
Psychology
Michael Collins, dubbed by the press "the loneliest man in history" while orbiting the far side of the Moon for roughly forty-seven minutes at a time, gently corrected the description — he said he felt isolated, but never lonely
Constellations
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere that kept transmitting for just 58 minutes as it fell, returning the first direct readings from inside the giant planet before rising heat and pressure silenced it for good
Deep Space
When a Soviet rover went silent on the Moon in 1971, scientists assumed it was gone for good — but nearly forty years later, the reflector strapped to its back answered a laser pulse from Earth as if no time had passed at all
Human Behaviour
The human brain accounts for about two per cent of body weight and consumes about twenty per cent of the body's total energy every day — and that consumption barely changes whether you are solving differential equations or staring at a wall
Science
A common dietary supplement — omega-3, the kind found in fish oil and flax — has been shown across nearly 4,000 people to reduce aggression by up to 28%, whether it's the heat-of-the-moment kind or the kind people plan in advance
Aerospace
The Arecibo message — humanity’s most famous deliberate radio message to another civilization — was aimed at a star cluster about 25,000 light-years away in 1974, meaning even an immediate reply would not reach Earth until around 52,000 CE
Science
In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing
Science
The tallest known living thing on Earth is a coastal redwood named Hyperion that stands 380 feet tall in a hidden grove in California, and its exact location is kept secret by the National Park Service because the last time tourists found a record-holding redwood they trampled its root system so badly the tree began dying.
Psychology
Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot photograph was nearly never taken — Carl Sagan pushed NASA to turn the camera back toward Earth after the planetary mission was over, while engineers worried the Sun’s glare could damage the optics
Space Industry
SPHEREx more than doubled the confirmed population of heavily reddened quasars at cosmic noon — and the new sample may catch supermassive black holes as they begin clearing the dust around them
Human Behaviour