Psychology
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Psilocybin research is no longer just for hard-to-treat cases — a new trial targeted recurrent depression in people who had not failed standard treatment, and the results are promising
Constellations
Embedded in the Voyager Golden Record’s Sounds of Earth montage are the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, recorded soon after she fell in love with Carl Sagan — a private meditation on human experience now drifting through interstellar space, waiting for a listener who may never come.
Science
The gold in an ordinary wedding ring was not made on Earth, or even inside an ordinary star, but in the most violent events in the universe, the collisions of dead stars and the flares of magnetised neutron stars, long before the Sun was born and the cloud that became our solar system took shape.
Human Behaviour
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone's seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
Science
When a Scottish sheep named Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 — cloned from a single cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe — she became the first mammal ever produced from an adult body cell, proving something developmental biologists had spent decades insisting was impossible
Psychology
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered virtual-reality wings — flapping to stay aloft, swerving through rings, swatting falling balls — and by the end, their brains were processing images of wings the same way they process images of real human limbs
Science
In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist announced he had gene-edited twin girls using CRISPR. The scientific consensus is that what he actually did was something else
Psychology
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
Culture
In 1811, the planners of Manhattan's street grid accidentally built one of the largest sun-aligned monuments in the world — and four times a year, the setting sun lines up perfectly with the city's east-west streets, in an event Neil deGrasse Tyson named Manhattanhenge
Science
Social science has a replication problem — a new massive study found that only half of published findings hold up when researchers try to repeat them and many that made it into textbooks
Science
Earth is quietly dusted with thousands of tonnes of space material every year, most of it as grains smaller than sand — and some of it can be sifted from the grit of ordinary roof gutters, tiny meteorites hiding in plain sight in cities.
Mind & Meaning
75% of Americans say they would trust AI shopping recommendations less if results were sponsored — which means OpenAI just made a decision that could structurally damage the thing that makes it valuable
Constellations
The makers of the Voyager Golden Record could not assume an alien would understand minutes or seconds, so the playback speed engraved on its cover is defined against a single, unchanging frequency of the hydrogen atom — a clock written into the physics of the universe.
Constellations
Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night.
Constellations