Human Behaviour
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
GPS works because its satellites carry atomic clocks so precise that Einstein’s relativity has to be built into the system: without correcting for the roughly 38 microseconds per day that satellite clocks gain in orbit, navigation errors would build up by about 10 kilometres a day.
Constellations
Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively venting water vapour and ice grains into space from a salty ocean hidden beneath its crust — and modelling suggests that ocean may have remained warm and chemically active for geological timescales, perhaps long enough for life to have had a chance to emerge.
Mind & Meaning
In 2026, wellbeing researchers suggested that simply asking people one question about how good their life is overall may be the clearest and most comparable way to measure wellbeing around the world
Science
In late 2023, Voyager 1 began sending unreadable data from interstellar space. NASA engineers eventually traced the fault to corrupted memory in one of the probe’s computers, rewrote part of its 46-year-old software, transmitted the fix across more than 24 billion kilometres, and waited roughly 45 hours for confirmation that the patch had worked.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu: "To understand others is to have knowledge; to understand oneself is to be illumined."
Earth Observation
Point Nemo sits so far from any coastline that the closest humans to it are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station passing overhead, not anyone standing on land.
Science
In 1908, something exploded above the remote Siberian forest of Tunguska with enough force to flatten roughly 2,000 square kilometres of trees — and more than a century later, no impact crater has ever been found, because the object, probably a small asteroid, appears to have blown itself apart in the atmosphere.
Mind & Meaning
Over ten workdays, researchers sent employees on 15-minute lunchtime walks through a park, and afternoons changed — sharper concentration, less fatigue, with much of the lift carried by how genuinely people enjoyed the walk.
Science
An exoplanet with a daytime temperature hot enough to vaporize iron has methane on its nightside because of an atmospheric circulation that should not be able to exist at that heat
Psychology
In 1974, psychologists found men were more likely to mistake fear for attraction after crossing a high, swaying suspension bridge
Flora And Fauna
Flamingos are not born pink: chicks hatch a dull grey and only slowly take on their famous colour as they feed on algae and tiny brine shrimp loaded with pigments called carotenoids — which means a flamingo's brilliant flush is essentially a visible read-out of how well, and how richly, it has been eating
Psychology
People who assembled a plain IKEA box would pay 63 percent more for it than people handed the same box already built, an overvaluation of their own labor that researchers named the IKEA effect
Banking
Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister who chaired 1MDB, was jailed over the looting of the state fund — and the roughly $681 million that landed in his personal bank account became the evidentiary spine of a global financial scandal
Mind & Meaning
We tend to blame burnout on simply doing too much, but some researchers argue it grows from six quieter mismatches — workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values — between a person and the job
Flora And Fauna