Human Behaviour
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 662 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Microsoft built an anechoic chamber so quiet that the background noise drops below the threshold of human hearing, and nobody has been able to sit inside it for more than 45 minutes because the brain begins to hallucinate when the only sounds left are your own heartbeat and lungs
Constellations
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
Mars Daily
The Opportunity rover's famous last words — "my battery is low and it's getting dark" — were never actually sent from Mars. The real story of where that sentence came from is stranger, and somehow sadder
Aerospace
In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — but he did not land inside Vostok 1. He ejected and parachuted to Earth separately, and Soviet officials omitted that fact from official records because aviation record rules required the pilot to land with the craft
Science
When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.
Climate Science
On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilometres from Texas to near Kansas City, and produced more than 116 cloud-to-ground strikes along its path, an event approximately fifty times longer than a typical lightning bolt that was missed at the time and only identified through a 2024 reanalysis of archived satellite data.
Constellations
A 36-year sweep of orbital debris has found the solar threshold where Earth’s upper atmosphere starts pulling space junk down faster, just as mega-constellations crowd low orbit
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