Technology
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Charles Darwin argued that the roots of human morality were not separate from animal life, and the surprise is what that does to civilization — manners, conscience, and restraint become not the opposite of instinct, but instinct complicated by memory, language, and the judgment of others
Flora And Fauna
In a hunting dive, the peregrine falcon becomes the fastest animal alive, plunging at speeds of more than 320 km/h — before striking its prey in mid-air, a blow that can kill on impact
Constellations
Whoever finds the Voyager Golden Record will know exactly how long it has been drifting, because the scientists who built it pressed a small sample of uranium into the cover — a built-in clock that keeps time for roughly a billion years.
Human Behaviour
New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of people requiring treatment for neglected tropical diseases dropped by 36 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Statistics 2026 report — gains now at risk as the funding that built them comes under pressure
Psychology
By 2035, the global space economy is predicted to reach roughly $1.8 trillion in annual value — up from approximately $630 billion in 2024 — driven by satellite mega-constellations, Earth observation services, commercial space stations, and the early stages of lunar resource extraction, in a quiet industrial revolution that many economists believe will exceed the speed of every previous economic transition in modern history
Science
The blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself — air is colorless, and a glass of it would look exactly like a glass of nothing — and the blue you see overhead is sunlight being scattered by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which deflect short blue wavelengths much more strongly than long red ones, in the same physics that makes the Sun appear yellow and a sunset appear red
Mind & Meaning
In the 1990s, anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued there's a natural ceiling on friendship set by the size of the human brain — around 150 people we can hold a real relationship with
Science
In December 1938 a museum curator sifting through a fisherman's catch in a South African port lifted out a heavy blue fish that science had known only from fossils and presumed extinct since the age of the dinosaurs
Energy News
The environmental impact of watching one hour of video on Netflix is approximately 36 grams of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a car for 150 metres, in a figure substantially smaller than the popular framing has claimed and one that demonstrates that the actual environmental burden of streaming comes not from the data centres people imagine but from the screens they watch on
Mind & Meaning
Humans are one of very few species whose females live for decades after they can no longer have children. One explanation is the 'grandmother hypothesis': long life may have evolved because grandmothers who helped gather food and raise grandchildren allowed more of those children to survive — quietly selecting, over generations, for longevity itself
Earth Observation
In 1971, a team of Soviet geologists in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert set a collapsed gas crater alight and assumed the flames would burn out within weeks, but more than five decades later the pit travelers now call the Door to Hell is still throwing orange light across the dunes every night
Science
The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water
Science
In 1835 the New York Sun told readers the Moon was full of life, from winged man-bats to bison — and pinned the discovery on a real astronomer who never said any of it
Science
A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starved, effectively rebooting its life cycle, and biologists have watched it perform this reversal indefinitely under laboratory conditions
Psychology