Constellations
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Off the coast of Japan lie perfectly geometric circles two metres wide pressed into the seabed, and divers who filmed them in 2011 learned they were courtship sculptures built grain by grain over a week by a pufferfish barely the size of a human hand.
Science
In 1999, the Post Office began rolling out Fujitsu's Horizon accounting system across thousands of branches, and within years more than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted over shortfalls generated by a screen before a High Court judge found the software itself could create phantom losses
Deep Space
In November 2026, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft will cross a milestone no human-made object has ever reached — the point at which a radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes a full 24 hours to arrive — meaning the engineers on Earth who say "good morning, Voyager" on a Monday will not hear its response until Wednesday, in a probe still operating roughly 49 years after it launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977
Deep Space
Five uncrewed Starship rockets are projected to launch toward Mars during the brief window in late 2026 when the two planets align for the closest possible journey — and depending on whether they arrive intact, the first crewed missions could follow within five to seven years, in what would be the first time human beings have traveled to another planet in the roughly 200,000-year history of our species
Launch Pad
Ariane 6 set to launch the heaviest payload in Ariane history, 36 Amazon Leo satellites, on the debut of upgraded boosters
Constellations
In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and photographed an active volcano erupting on Io, the first time volcanic activity had ever been observed on a world other than Earth, spotted by a navigation engineer checking the probe's position
Flora And Fauna
When a honeybee colony outgrows its hive it makes a genuinely democratic decision: scout bees fly out, inspect possible new homes, and 'campaign' for their favourite with waggle dances, lobbying harder for better sites — and only once enough scouts have converged on the same spot does the whole swarm lift off together, almost always choosing well
Science
A volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits closer to outer space than Mount Everest does, not because it is taller, but because the Earth bulges at the equator and Everest, further from that bulge, is actually deeper inside the planet.
Flora And Fauna
A single 'supercolony' of Argentine ants is thought to stretch some 6,000 km along the coasts of southern Europe, from Italy to Spain — billions of workers across millions of nests that treat one another as kin and refuse to fight, making it one of the largest cooperative societies on Earth, second only to our own
Human Behaviour
The average human brain volume has decreased by approximately 150 cubic centimetres since the late Pleistocene, equivalent to roughly the volume of a tennis ball, in a finding documented across nearly ninety years of peer-reviewed physical anthropology research, with no agreed scientific explanation for why one of the most distinctive evolutionary trends of our species has reversed
Mind & Meaning
Psychologist Laura Carstensen uncovered a surprising upside to growing older: as our sense of the time we have left grows shorter, we invest more in the people and activities that matter most to us
Flora And Fauna
The electric eel can generate a jolt of around 600 volts — several times the shock from a household socket — by stacking thousands of specialised cells together like tiny batteries, and rather than only zapping prey underwater, it has been filmed rearing up out of the water to press its chin directly against a larger attacker
Psychology
Quote by Hannah Arendt: “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”e: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
Flora And Fauna
The Australian superb lyrebird can imitate almost any sound it has ever heard — chainsaws, camera shutters, car alarms, the calls of more than 20 other species — with enough accuracy that the birds being imitated often can't tell the difference
Science