Station News
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
When Michel Siffre emerged from a lightless cave in 1962 after 63 days alone, he was stunned to learn the real date. Cut off from clocks, calendars, and sunlight, he believed it was only August 20 — nearly a month earlier than it really was. His sense of time had compressed so dramatically that two months underground had felt like little more than one.
Space Travel
A small European spacecraft called Philae became the first machine in human history to soft-land on a comet — bouncing twice in near-zero gravity before settling in a shadowed crevice on Comet 67P — after a 10-year, 6.4-billion-kilometre journey across deep space, where it transmitted scientific readings home for roughly 60 hours before its batteries finally died
Science
China's high-speed rail network now stretches more than 50,000 kilometres across the country — longer than the combined high-speed rail networks of every other nation on Earth put together — and the entire system was built in roughly 17 years, beginning with a single line opened for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and now connects 33 of the country's 34 provincial-level divisions with trains running at routine commercial speeds of 350 kilometres per hour
Human Behaviour
The tomb chamber of China's first emperor has never been opened in the 2,200 years since his death in 210 BC — sealed beneath a 76-metre pyramid mound outside Xi'an, surrounded by 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and described by ancient texts as containing rivers of mercury that modern soil readings around the mound have now quietly confirmed
Space Travel
In 2028, China plans to launch the Tianwen-3 mission to the surface of Mars, drill two metres into Martian rock, collect at least 500 grams of soil and stone, and return those samples to Earth by 2031 — meaning if the mission succeeds on schedule, China will become the first nation in human history to bring back physical material from another planet, potentially years ahead of NASA and ESA's own delayed Mars Sample Return effort
Science
Astronauts returning from spacewalks report that space carries a distinct smell of seared steak and hot metal that clings to their suits once they climb back inside
Science
In 1977, a Hawaii guru named Chris Butler broke from the Hare Krishna movement and built a parallel sect whose members were instructed to enter politics under their own names
Science
Hundreds of preserved dinosaur footprints — left by giant sauropods and a meat-eating Megalosaurus walking across a soft muddy lagoon roughly 166 million years ago — were uncovered in Oxfordshire, England in 2025, in tracks so well preserved that paleontologists can measure the individual stride lengths of animals that walked the Earth before the first flowers had ever evolved
Science
In the Arctic wilderness near Russia's border with Norway, sealed beneath a welded steel cover bolted into the ground, sits the deepest hole human beings have ever drilled into the Earth — a 9-inch-wide shaft called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, plunging 7.6 miles down through 2.7 billion years of rock, abandoned in 1992 when the temperature at the bottom reached 356°F and the rocks themselves began to flow like plastic
Aerospace
In April 2026, the Pentagon asked Congress to more than double the U.S. Space Force's budget, from roughly $31 billion to $71 billion, even as a new Mitchell Institute report warned that no one could yet agree where competition in orbit ends and open conflict begins
Space Travel
Astronauts returning from six-month missions describe a persistent 'observer' sensation — the feeling of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame, weeks after they're back on the ground
Science
In the limestone mountains of the Black Sea coast, deep beneath a single mountain range in the Caucasus, sits a vertical chasm called Veryovkina that plunges 2,212 metres into the Earth — roughly seven times the height of the Eiffel Tower straight down — and reaching its bottom requires a four-day descent through near-freezing waterfalls, vertical shafts, and absolute darkness so complete that explorers report their brains begin hallucinating light in the deepest chambers.
Science
There are roughly 4,400 tiny explosions happening inside your body every second, as atoms of radioactive potassium quietly decay in your muscles and tissues right now — you have been faintly radioactive your entire life, and you will be for all of it
Space Travel
If you could drive a car straight up into the sky at highway speed, you would reach the edge of outer space in under an hour — the only thing protecting every living creature on Earth from the lethal vacuum is a layer of air thinner, relative to the planet, than the skin on an apple
Science