Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
In November 2011, NASA launched a car-sized rover called Curiosity toward Mars on a planned two-year mission to look for evidence of ancient lakes and rivers — and almost 15 years later, the rover is still moving across the Martian surface, still drilling into rocks, and still transmitting data back to Earth
Space Travel
In April 1970, three American astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were 320,000 kilometres from Earth — closer to the Moon than to home — when one of their oxygen tanks exploded, and engineers on the ground had 96 hours to solve a problem so complex the solution was eventually worked out using slide rules and read back to the astronauts to keep them alive
Science
In 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back
Human Behaviour
For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer's defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match
Mind & Meaning
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything
Mind & Meaning
The most statistically dominant career performance in any major sport on Earth was not Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Wayne Gretzky — it was an Australian cricketer named Don Bradman, who retired in 1948 with a career batting average that places him roughly six standard deviations above the mean of test cricket history
Human Behaviour
People who replay old conversations at night often aren't anxious or insecure — many are processing words they were never allowed to say out loud in the moment
Psychology
Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when older adults were asked to imagine a medical breakthrough adding decades to their lives, their preferences shifted back toward those of younger people — suggesting that the emotional calm of old age may come less from age itself than from the way a shrinking time horizon changes what people value.
Mind & Meaning
MIT researchers tested participants from age 10 to 71 and found something they described as genuinely unexpected: vocabulary — the brain's accumulated store of language and meaning — peaks not in youth but in the late 60s and early 70s
Constellations
There is no permanently dark side of the Moon. The far side gets sunlight just like the near side — we simply don’t see it from Earth because the Moon is tidally locked, taking about as long to spin once as it does to orbit us once.
Human Behaviour
The hundreds of human skeletons scattered around Roopkund Lake at 5,029 metres in the Indian Himalayas were long assumed to be the remains of a single 9th-century pilgrimage group killed by a sudden hailstorm, in an explanation that a 2019 peer-reviewed ancient DNA study has substantially overturned, by demonstrating that the skeletons came from at least three different populations and died across more than one thousand years.
Science
Some of the water sitting in your glass is older than the Sun having formed inside interstellar clouds billions of years before the solar system existed
Psychology
A University of Toronto study found that chasing happiness can make people less happy — not because happiness is bad, but because constantly trying to force it burns through the self-control needed to do the things that actually create it.
Science
For decades, scientists repeated as established fact that bacteria in the human body outnumber human cells ten to one — a 2016 study by the Weizmann Institute of Science reviewed the original source and found the actual ratio is closer to 1:1, making the figure one of the most widely cited errors in modern biology
Constellations