Science
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 685 articles · Back to full archive
Earth Observation
NOAA has placed an 82 per cent probability that El Niño will emerge in the central Pacific between May and July 2026, the climate state that in 1997-98 caused more than 20,000 deaths worldwide and approximately US$36 billion in damage, that in 2015-16 produced what was then the warmest year on record and the most extensive Amazon drought yet measured, and that has accompanied every one of the ten warmest years in the global temperature record, all of which have occurred since 2015
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In 1964, a quiet British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed the existence of an invisible field permeating the entire universe — the thing that gives every particle of matter its mass — and it took another 48 years before scientists at CERN finally proved he was right, in a discovery that completed our most fundamental theory of how the universe is built
Science
The Human Genome Project was declared complete in 2003 — but about 8% of human DNA was still missing, including some of the regions most critical to chromosome stability and immunity, and it took another nineteen years to finally read it all
Deep Space
In 1992, the number of confirmed planets outside our solar system was zero — and as of this year, NASA's exoplanet archive lists more than 6,000 of them, with the lead scientist on the archive predicting the number could hit 100,000 within the next seven years
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There is a spot in the South Pacific so far from any coastline that when the International Space Station passes overhead, the nearest human beings may be the astronauts in orbit — not anyone on land.
Science
China has just sent stem-cell-grown structures resembling early human embryos to its space station — the first experiment of its kind in orbit — to find out whether humans can actually reproduce beyond Earth
Human Behaviour
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I'm most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn't the worst part
Science
Paleontologists in New Mexico have just dug up a two-legged, beak-mouthed reptile that looks almost exactly like a small dinosaur — except it lived more than a hundred million years before any dinosaur evolved that body plan, and it wasn't a dinosaur at all, but a distant cousin of modern crocodiles
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The Bronze Age civilization that built the city of Akrotiri on Santorini around 1600 BCE appears to have known a volcanic eruption was coming and evacuated almost everyone before it happened — archaeologists have found no bodies in the ruins, just abandoned belongings — and to this day nobody fully understands what warning signs they read, or where they went after they left
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In 1816, a French physician named René Laennec, embarrassed to press his ear against the chest of a young female patient, rolled up a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it instead — and that improvised paper cylinder, which let him hear her heart more clearly than direct contact had, became the original prototype for the stethoscope and quietly reshaped two centuries of medicine
Constellations
Scientists tracked 8,000 supermassive black holes across the universe and found most slowed their growth over the same 10 billion years — not because of any force acting on them, but because the universe ran low on the cold gas they needed to keep feeding
Science
The largest known organism on Earth isn't a whale or a tree — it's a single fungus growing underground in Oregon's Malheur National Forest, covering nearly four square miles, mostly invisible, estimated to be between two and eight thousand years old and slowly killing the forest above it from beneath
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For more than thirty years after his death in 1955, Albert Einstein's brain was kept in a series of jars in the basement of a Kansas pathologist who had removed it during the autopsy without permission — and when researchers finally examined it in the 1980s and 1990s, one study found that a specific region called the inferior parietal lobule was about fifteen percent wider than the average brain
Space Travel
When Soviet engineers landed Venera 13 on the surface of Venus in 1982, they expected the probe to survive maybe thirty minutes in the planet's lead-melting heat and crushing pressure — it survived 127 minutes and sent back the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet
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