Aerospace
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Your own voice sounds different to other people than it sounds to you, because the version you hear is reaching your inner ear partly through the bones of your skull, which amplify lower frequencies that everyone else cannot hear — and the recorded version that strikes most people as alien when they first hear it is in fact the only version of their voice anyone else has ever known
Science
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed
Deep Space
Roughly 100 tons of dust and small particles from outer space fall onto the Earth every single day — most of it microscopic, some of it older than our solar system — meaning the dust you find on your bookshelves and windowsills almost certainly contains, mixed in with the ordinary terrestrial dirt, a small fraction of material formed in the deaths of stars that exploded before the Earth itself was even born
Science
Six men spent 520 days sealed inside a fake spacecraft that never moved, and by the end some had drifted so far out of sync that they were sleeping while the others were awake — exactly the kind of breakdown mission scientists were watching for.
Space Travel
NASA is on track to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in roughly 56 years by 2028— followed by the establishment of a sustained human presence near the Moon's south pole in the 2030s — in a civilizational shift that would mark the first time in human history that our species has lived continuously on another world, rather than briefly visiting and returning home
Mind & Meaning
The number of people living past the age of 80 worldwide is projected to triple by 2050 — from approximately 145 million today to roughly 426 million — making the over-80 cohort the fastest-growing demographic on the planet, in a civilizational shift now widely referred to as "the silver tsunami" and that researchers expect to redefine almost everything we associate with the structure of human society
Human Behaviour
By 2050, more than half of the world's population is projected to be myopic — needing glasses or contacts to see clearly at a distance — according to a series of international vision studies, in a shift driven not by genetics but by the amount of time children now spend indoors and the relative absence of time spent focusing on the horizon during the years when the eye is still forming
Human Behaviour
Within the lifetime of children being born today, the global human population is projected to begin shrinking for the first time since the Black Death — no country on Earth currently has a fertility rate above 7 children per woman, and dozens of high-income nations have fallen below 1.5 — in a civilizational shift that demographers now expect to end the era of sustained population growth that has defined humanity for the past several thousand years
Mind & Meaning
A small spongy artifact found in 2021 in the corner of a Neolithic oven in central Turkey was identified in 2024 as a piece of fermented bread roughly 8,600 years old — placed by someone in the doorway of a mud-brick house at Çatalhöyük around 6600 BCE, in what archaeologists believe is the oldest fermented bread ever discovered, and the oldest direct evidence of the human relationship with yeast
Constellations
When Luna 9 bounced to a stop in the Ocean of Storms in February 1966, Britain’s Jodrell Bank observatory intercepted its picture transmission, recognised the newspaper-fax format, and helped the Daily Express publish the first photographs from the Moon’s surface before the Soviets released them
Mind & Meaning
The map of a lost Mayan megacity, with more than 6,000 buildings and a peak population of 50,000 people, had been hiding in plain sight for ten years inside a government survey of the Mexican rainforest — until a PhD student at Tulane University scrolled past page 16 of a Google search in 2024 and recognized what was in the scan
Science
The Moon is so far from Earth that, using its average distance, you could line up every other planet in the solar system between us and still have about 4,400 kilometres left over.
Constellations
There's a strange gap in the sizes of planets across the galaxy that nobody can explain, and a proposed NASA telescope could settle it by staring at 20,000 baby stars
Science
Antarctica's Blood Falls runs red because iron-rich brine reddens on contact with the air
Constellations