Psychology
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the known elements into a table and left gaps for what had not yet been discovered, but the detail that makes the periodic table remarkable is that chemistry became organized enough to predict missing pieces of reality
Psychology
The Stoic philosopher Seneca observed that what makes a person genuinely happy is not how much they have, but how little they need to be content — and the small jolt of his observation, two thousand years later, is that most modern definitions of the good life are still organized around acquiring more of exactly the things he warned would never quite settle the longing they were meant to satisfy
Human Behaviour
A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer's risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable
Psychology
The marshmallow test, redone with ten times as many children, found that a four-year-old's willpower mostly stopped predicting teenage success once family background was taken into account
Science
The hundreds of skeletons in a frozen Himalayan lake were blamed on one ancient disaster, until DNA showed some of the dead came from the eastern Mediterranean and died about a thousand years apart
Space Industry
The International Space Station orbits Earth roughly every 90 minutes, yet for years no American spacecraft could reach it — a gap a single private company stepped in to close
Aerospace
NASA still has no American-built way to reach the International Space Station except SpaceX's Dragon capsule — a dependency that has lasted years and shows no sign of ending soon
Aerospace
At a 140,000-square-foot plant in Long Beach that the aerospace industry calls Space Beach, a former Raytheon executive is using agentic AI to turn out defense electronics in weeks instead of years — not to replace his engineers, but because the Pentagon wants far more hardware than the shrinking pool of engineers can build
Science
An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China's Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample
Human Behaviour
The Stanford study that tracked 'follow your passion' believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong
Mind & Meaning
The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Athens, Rome, or Cairo — it is Jericho, in the West Bank, where archaeologists have found evidence of settlement going back roughly 11,000 years, meaning people have been living in the same place since the end of the last Ice Age, before writing, before metalworking, and at the dawn of agriculture itself
Psychology
Above 26,000 feet on Mount Everest — in the death zone where the air contains roughly one-third the oxygen of sea level — climate change is melting the ice that has buried more than 200 frozen climbers, and Nepali army teams recovering them in 2024 also removed approximately 11 tonnes of trash, in a quiet revelation that the highest place humans have ever reached is also a slowly emerging landfill
Science
The first human trial of a therapy designed to partially reset the biological age of human cells was approved in January 2026 — using molecular switches that scientists have already shown can reverse the aging of cells in the laboratory — meaning humanity has, for the first time, formally entered the era of testing whether cellular aging can be reversed in living people.
Psychology
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but the failure to become the self you were quietly meant to be — a despair so subtle that most people who carry it never notice they are carrying it — and the difficulty of late-life regret is the slow recognition that the person you have been is not quite the person you started out hoping to be
Mind & Meaning