Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
If a bee searching for nectar might be conscious and ChatGPT almost certainly isn't, what exactly were we measuring when we decided something was aware?
Mind & Meaning
When archaeologists excavating a Han Dynasty tomb near Changsha in 1971 opened the innermost of four nested coffins, they found the body of a noblewoman named Xin Zhui — who had died roughly 2,140 years ago — so perfectly preserved that her skin was still soft, her joints still moved, and her stomach still contained 138 melon seeds from her last meal, making it the best-preserved human body ever recovered from the ancient world
Psychology
In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for
Science
We tend to think of Earth’s atmosphere as a vast protective shield, but astronauts looking back from the ISS see something far more fragile: a thin blue-green line, like the skin of an apple wrapped around a basketball, separating every living thing we know from the complete inhospitality of space.
Mind & Meaning
Most cat owners I know assume their older cat is just slowing down with age — veterinary research suggests up to 92% of cats over ten have arthritis, and most are hiding it
Science
In September 2025, NASA announced that a Perseverance sample from a Mars rock called Cheyava Falls contained one of the strongest potential biosignatures yet found on the planet: evidence of ancient water, organic carbon, and chemical reactions that could have supplied energy for microbes, all preserved in a dried-up river valley.
Human Behaviour
People born between 1945 and 1965 were taught that needing help was weakness, and most of them are still living by a rule no one would defend out loud today
Human Behaviour
The quiet competence many women carry into their 60s isn't always confidence; it can be the residue of decades spent making sure nothing fell apart
Human Behaviour
In 1975, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick filmed mothers dropping their faces into a blank mask and found that even securely attached pairs fall out of sync roughly seventy percent of the time, and that what holds the bond together is not the match but the repair that follows the rupture
Mind & Meaning
Chris Butler stepped out of public view a generation ago and reportedly hasn't given a real interview in decades — the clearest photos of the reclusive Hawaii guru are now roughly 40 years old
Mind & Meaning
Gunpowder, the substance that would eventually be used to build guns, cannons, bombs, and almost every explosive weapon humans have ever made, was invented in China sometime around the 9th century — not as a weapon at all, but accidentally, by Taoist alchemists who were searching for a chemical recipe that would give human beings an elixir of immortality
Space Travel
In June 2024, a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e-6 became the first machine in human history to return samples from the far side of the Moon — drilling and scooping roughly 2 kilograms of lunar soil from a region no spacecraft had ever sampled, and delivering it back to Earth, giving humanity its first physical material from the half of the Moon that has been permanently turned away from our planet since it became tidally locked billions of years ago
Science
Scientists have directly observed less than 0.001 percent of the deep ocean floor — an area comparable to the state of Rhode Island — despite decades of exploration, according to a global dataset of 44,000 deep-sea dives compiled by the Ocean Discovery League
Human Behaviour
A reporter spent nearly a year combing through more than 25,000 pages of private documents handed over by a former campaign insider — a paper trail now reshaping how Washington views one of its rising figures
Human Behaviour