Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Everyone with ordinary inherited blue eyes appears to share a common ancestor, probably someone who lived around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, when a tiny genetic switch near the OCA2 gene reduced brown pigment in the iris — meaning blue eyes, as we know them today, may trace back to one ancient mutation.
Science
Every time you give a deck of cards a proper shuffle you almost certainly create an order that has never existed before in the history of the universe, because the possible arrangements vastly outnumber the seconds since the Big Bang
Science
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice in the first 52 seconds of flight, filling the spacecraft with warning lights and turning Mission Control’s data into nonsense — until a young controller named John Aaron recognised an obscure failure pattern and calmly said: “Try SCE to Aux.”
Space Industry
NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft happened to be sitting in the path of the July 2012 Carrington-class storm and took the full hit instead of Earth — the only reason we have detailed measurements of a blow we never felt
Space Industry
Solar storms don't shock people directly — they induce electric currents in long metal, meaning power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables become the very antennas that channel the damage into modern life
Constellations
Our galaxy and its neighbours are racing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of distant superclusters ahead and a vast, near-empty void shoving us from behind
Mind & Meaning
Researchers had 124 adults cut their email checking to three times a day — what dropped wasn't their workload, it was their daily stress
Science
The notebooks Marie Curie used in her research remain radioactively contaminated more than a hundred years later. Some Curie papers have been found contaminated with radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1,600 years, and original volumes are kept under strict radiation-protection controls before anyone can handle them.
Science
In the weightlessness of orbit, an astronaut’s heart can become more spherical as it no longer works against gravity in the usual way, while their spine stretches enough to make them measurably taller before they return to Earth.
Constellations
In the far future the expansion of space will carry every other galaxy beyond the reach of our telescopes, leaving the astronomers of that era with an empty sky and no way to ever discover that the Big Bang happened
Constellations
Deep inside Neptune and Uranus the pressure is thought to crush carbon into diamonds, which then sink slowly through the planet as a glittering rain
Deep Impact
About 66 million years ago an asteroid roughly 10-15 km wide struck off Mexico's Yucatan, gouging a crater some 180 km across — and the extinction that followed wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and around 75% of all species
Science
A Greenland shark studied in 2016 was estimated to be nearly 400 years old, meaning it may have been born around the time Shakespeare’s era was ending — and, astonishingly, would not have reached sexual maturity for more than another century.
Constellations
HD 189733b looks deep blue from space, almost Earth-like at first glance — but its colour comes not from oceans, but from silicate particles in a scorching atmosphere where glass may rain sideways through winds of thousands of kilometres an hour.
Climate Science