Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
In June 2026, Relativity Space — the rocket company Eric Schmidt took over in 2025, whose one rocket has never reached orbit — said it would privately build and fly a Mars orbiter in 2028, carrying NASA's Aeolus atmospheric instruments and doubling as a communications relay, paid for by a philanthropic backer it has not named
Mind & Meaning
The ideal amount of leisure time might be less than you think; research suggests somewhere around two to five hours a day
Constellations
The oldest solid material ever found on Earth didn't come from Earth at all — it was locked inside a meteorite that landed near Murchison, Victoria in 1969, and the stardust grains inside formed roughly 7 billion years ago, before the Sun existed.
Econoplex
In 1908, a 27-year-old Bavarian invented a five-letter word that would fit on a watch dial in any language — and trademarked it before he had a factory to make the watches
Science
We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a 100-word email written with ChatGPT has been estimated to require roughly a bottle’s worth of water once data-centre cooling and electricity generation are counted — and scaled to global demand, researchers project AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2027, roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual freshwater withdrawals.
Military Space
DARPA just quietly asked industry how to rebuild a destroyed satellite fleet in hours — and the request reveals what the Pentagon now assumes about the first day of a war with China
Science
Most people alive today will live to see the Arctic Ocean lose its summer ice — for the first time since before our species left Africa, 115,000 years ago
Science
By 2025, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White Mountains remained the oldest known non-clonal living tree, and the exact location of the gnarled, wind-stunted survivor is kept secret by the US Forest Service to protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters.
Mind & Meaning
A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia's Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents
Mind & Meaning
A 43,000-year-old stone roughly the size of a potato, found in a rock shelter in central Spain, was confirmed in 2025 to bear a single red-ochre fingerprint in its centre — placed deliberately by a Neanderthal so that the rest of the stone resembled a face — making it one of the oldest known examples of human-like abstract thinking in the prehistoric record, by a species many people still imagine as incapable of art
Science
Beneath the streets of Naples lies a 2,400-year-old network of Greek and Roman tunnels and cisterns carved into soft volcanic tuff, and during World War II tens of thousands of residents sheltered in the same hollow chambers their ancestors had dug to quarry building stone.
Mind & Meaning
Researchers tracked football fans and found they tended to overestimate how long the result would affect their mood, though prompting them to consider other upcoming events softened the forecast
Human Behaviour
By the early 2030s, the United States is projected to have more adults over 65 than children under 18 for the first time in the country's history — a demographic milestone the Census Bureau now expects to arrive around 2034 — and within the lifetime of most people reading this, the median American is likely to be approaching the median resident of Japan today
Human Behaviour
Viktor Frankl wrote 'Man's Search for Meaning' in nine days in 1945 — and the psychiatrist argued meaning is found in serving others, not in chasing your own happiness
Human Behaviour