Constellations
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
For decades, we did not know whether Earth-like worlds were cosmic accidents. But Kepler and TESS have shifted the mystery: small planets are common, and Kepler’s census suggests rocky worlds in the habitable zones of ordinary stars may be common too. If so, the deeper question is not where the planets are — but why, so far, the universe remains quiet.
Constellations
Voyager 1 has been travelling non-stop since 1977, faster than a speeding bullet every second of every day, and it has not yet reached the distance of a single light-year from Earth
Mind & Meaning
By 2075, Goldman Sachs projects India will overtake the United States to become one of the world's two largest economies — driven by India's much younger population and continued urbanization — in what economists now describe as the largest shift in global economic power since the rise of the United States itself in the 20th century.
Science
Between 2006 and 2014, a NASA balloon experiment floating above Antarctica picked up two bizarre radio signals coming up from beneath the ice at angles that should have been impossible — and more than a decade later, no physicist has been able to explain what the signals actually were, with some researchers suggesting they may have been caused by a particle currently unknown to science
Science
The ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen — not the rainforest, which uses up most of what it makes — through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, microscopic marine organisms so abundant that a single teaspoon of seawater can contain as many as a million of them.
Science
A giant barrel sponge growing on a Caribbean reef off the island of Curaçao was estimated to be roughly 2,300 years old when it was photographed by researchers — meaning it began growing at the bottom of the ocean during the lifetime of Hannibal and survived as a single continuous living organism, filtering seawater on that exact spot, from before the founding of the Roman Empire until it died of disease in 2012
Space Travel
Human beings have now lived continuously aboard the International Space Station since November 2, 2000 — more than 25 consecutive years without a single day when no human was orbiting above the planet — in the longest sustained off-world human presence in the history of the species
Space Travel
In June 2025, a 65-year-old former NASA astronaut named Peggy Whitson became the oldest woman ever to orbit Earth — taking off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon as commander of the privately funded Axiom Mission 4 — and during her 18-day stay on the International Space Station, she pushed her career total past 695 cumulative days in space, the most of any American astronaut and the most of any woman who has ever lived.
Mind & Meaning
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
Deep Space
A massive star appears to have exploded twice — first as a supernova, and then again days later when the two neutron stars its first explosion had created violently crashed into each other — in what astronomers announced in December 2025 may be the first event of its kind ever observed, so unprecedented that physicists have invented a new word for it: "superkilonova"
Science
The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when compounds made by microscopic marine algae are broken down by bacteria, death, and grazing in the sea.
Science
A blind cave salamander called the olm is projected to live past a hundred years, and biologists still cannot explain how it ages so slowly
Science
For decades the heavy rocks that carve trails across a Death Valley lakebed were never seen moving, until cameras caught them gliding on thin rafts of melting ice pushed by a light wind
Earth News
For as much as 14,000 years, the aspen clone called Pando has spread across 106 Utah acres as roughly 47,000 trunks, 13 million pounds of wood and roots, and one male organism still trying to replace itself through shoots the deer keep eating
Marsdaily