Energy News
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Patients in the late stages of Alzheimer's who no longer recognize their own children can often still sing along, word for word, to songs they loved when they were young — because the brain regions that store musical memory are among the last the disease destroys, in one of the quietest mercies neuroscience has ever found
Science
The spider hides by pretending to be the fungus that kills its neighbors, and it took scientists this long to notice because science had no category for an animal that imitates a disease
Econoplex
On the evening of June 19, Claude Guillemot — one of the five brothers who built Ubisoft from a Breton farmhouse into a global publisher of Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six — was killed when his Cessna 421 banked and crashed on approach to La Baule, and the question of whether his family's controlling stake holds together now has no clean answer
Cyber War
In 2011, Microsoft signed the Secure Boot certificates that still sit inside millions of Windows PCs, and the first one expires on June 24, 2026, leaving unupdated machines running normally while future boot-level revocations stop reaching them
Constellations
Jonathan McDowell has been tracking every object in orbit since 1989 — a one-person catalog that started as a weekly email newsletter and became the source governments and newsrooms cite when they need to know how many Starlink satellites are actually up there
Constellations
Europa’s surface is almost too clean. In a Solar System full of impactors, an icy moon should accumulate scars for billions of years — yet Europa has very few. The simplest explanation is also the strangest: the surface we see is young, constantly rewritten by forces rising from beneath the ice.
Science
Naked mole rats almost never get cancer and routinely live more than thirty years — roughly ten times longer than any other rodent their size — and researchers in October 2025 finally identified one of the key mechanisms: a handful of tiny mutations in a single gene that powers DNA repair in the mole rats but suppresses it in humans
Space Travel
In 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe survived 23 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 475-degree heat and 90-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those minutes it became the first human-made object to transmit data from another planet, and engineers only realised they had the signal after rerunning the tape weeks later
Mind & Meaning
The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has been famously interpreted by economic historians as a political allegory about American monetary policy in the 1890s — with the yellow brick road representing the gold standard and Dorothy's silver slippers, changed to ruby in the 1939 film, representing a competing movement to back the dollar with silver
Science
Mars wasn’t always the frozen desert we see today. The evidence now suggests it once had rivers, long-lived lakes, and possibly a northern ocean — for a stretch of time longer than complex animals have existed on Earth.
Science
Most of an octopus's brain cells live in its arms, not in its head — only about 8 percent of its 500 million neurons sit inside the central brain, with the rest spread across the eight arms and the optic lobes behind its eyes, in a body design some neuroscientists describe as the closest thing to an alien mind humanity has ever studied
Space Travel
A spacecraft no larger than a small car, launched the year Star Wars came out, is still moving outward at 38,000 miles per hour far beyond the orbit of Pluto — and the radio signals it sends home, traveling at the speed of light, now take more than 23 hours to reach the engineers who built it, most of whom are no longer alive
Science
In 1944, Neal Miller harnessed hungry rats in a runway and watched them pull harder toward the food the closer they got — and harder away from the shock, with avoidance climbing steepest exactly where the reward sat, the gradient the British psychologist Jeffrey Gray later mapped to a septo-hippocampal brake
Deep Space
The closest star to our Sun, a small red dwarf named Proxima Centauri, is approximately 4.2 light-years from Earth — which means if you set out at the sustained cruise speed of the fastest space probes humanity has ever sent on a one-way trajectory out of the solar system, you would arrive at the nearest neighbouring star roughly 73,000 years from now, long after every civilization currently on Earth has ended
Solar Daily