Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
On WASP-121 b, the evening sky runs hot enough to tear water apart, hotter than the morning sky — and James Webb caught the difference by watching the planet turn during a single transit
Internet Space
When JAXA engineers needed a self-deploying transformation mechanism small enough to survive a lunar landing inside a metal sphere, they called the Japanese toy company behind the original 1984 Transformers line — and the robot that emerged, eight centimeters across, spent 100 minutes rolling across the Moon in January 2024 and quietly rewrote what a machine the size of a tennis ball can do on another world
Space Scopes
When the Soviet Venera 13 probe touched down on Venus in March 1982, it survived for 127 minutes in a 465-degree atmosphere that crushed it with the pressure of nearly a kilometre of ocean water, and in that time it scraped a soil sample, analysed it, and transmitted the first colour photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet.
Constellations
When SpaceX described a million AI data-center satellites, each first-generation craft stretched wider than a Boeing 747, and astronomers saw the same problem Rubin Observatory was built to hate: bright moving hardware crossing the faintest parts of the sky
Science
One electric eel delivered an 860-volt shock, the highest ever measured from a living animal — and a 2019 study revealed it belongs to one of three separate species
Human Behaviour
Japan's 'ikigai' has no single English translation, but the simple idea of having a reason to get up each morning was linked, in a 2008 study that tracked 43,000 Japanese adults for seven years, to measurably lower mortality
Constellations
Australia's Independent Commission Against Corruption can compel testimony that would be inadmissible in any criminal court — a power no American investigator possesses
Space Industry
SpaceX raises a record $75 billion in its Nasdaq debut, with rockets, satellites and AI compute named as where the money goes
Psychology
The neuroscience of intense romantic obsession shows that the brain in early-stage romantic love activates the same dopamine reward circuits as cocaine and gambling, with serotonin transporter levels indistinguishable from those of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, in a finding that explains why the experience feels involuntary and typically resolves within approximately 18 months regardless of outcome
Constellations
The James Webb Space Telescope may have seen the chemical fingerprint of a molecule linked to marine life on Earth in the atmosphere of K2-18b, 124 light-years away. But the signal is still tentative: it could be dimethyl sulfide, a related sulfur compound, or something else entirely, and scientists have not yet ruled out non-biological explanations.
Constellations
When SpaceX filed the paperwork for the largest IPO in history in May 2026, the prospectus that retail investors could download ran past 300 pages, while the unredacted version sat in a classified vault inside the SEC's Washington headquarters, readable by perhaps a dozen people with the right security clearances
Earth Observation
Beneath the Antarctic ice, a lake the size of Lake Ontario has been sealed off from sunlight for roughly 15 million years, and when Russian drillers finally reached Lake Vostok in 2012 they recovered water teeming with traces of life that had evolved in total darkness.
Human Behaviour
The single largest political donation in modern US history wasn't a campaign check but a self-built spending machine — America PAC absorbed $239 million aimed at one candidate
Constellations
Mars can produce dust storms so vast they swallow the planet. In 2018, one of them turned day into darkness for NASA’s solar-powered Opportunity rover, cutting off the sunlight that had sustained it through more than 14 years on Mars.
Mind & Meaning