Flora And Fauna
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
A single day on Mercury, from one sunrise to the next, lasts 176 Earth days, which is two full Mercury years
Mind & Meaning
People in the longest living populations on Earth tend to eat roughly four to five times as many beans as the average Westerner — black beans in Nicoya, fava beans and chickpeas in Sardinia and Ikaria, soybeans in Okinawa — making beans the single most consistent dietary feature across communities where reaching 100 is not unusual, in a finding that has held up across decades of longevity research
Mind & Meaning
A survey of over 300,000 Americans found that well-being doesn't simply fade with age — it bends into a U, high in youth, sinking to a low around 50, then quietly climbing back up into old age, against what many expect
Human Behaviour
Approximately 10,000 years ago, teenagers in what is now western Sweden chewed wads of birch bark pitch and spat them out, and the saliva preserved in the wads contained enough human and microbial DNA that scientists have since sequenced the chewers' complete genomes, identified the food they had eaten that day, and detected the bacterial signature of their gum disease.
Mind & Meaning
We tend to view happiness as a reward for hard work and success, but a review of the evidence suggested the arrow may point the other way — happiness often comes first, then shapes work, love and health
Science
Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction
Science
In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified.
Human Behaviour
An email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" infected 45 million computers in 24 hours after it was released in May 2000 — disabling email systems at the Pentagon, the CIA, and most of the world's largest corporations — and the 23-year-old Filipino college dropout who wrote it now runs a phone repair booth in Manila, never prosecuted because cybercrime was not yet illegal in the Philippines
Mind & Meaning
Around 40% of US teens are online 'almost constantly' — nearly double the share a decade ago — yet nearly half of them say social media is mostly bad for people their age
Space Travel
Breathable oxygen has now been produced on the surface of Mars — generated between 2021 and 2023 by a NASA experiment about the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover — in the first time humans have ever made air on another planet, opening the door to bringing astronauts safely home one day
Human Behaviour
A 2020 study in Sweden found that dogs can sense heat and thermal radiation with the tip of their nose — meaning they can detect a warm object across a room even with their eyes closed — making them only the second mammal on Earth known to possess this ability, alongside the vampire bat, which uses it to find blood vessels beneath the skin of sleeping prey
Psychology
The people of Okinawa, Japan only eat until they are about 80 percent full, then stop — and the practice has been linked in multiple peer-reviewed studies to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, slower biological aging, and a measurable extension of healthy lifespan, in one of the simplest evidence-backed longevity practices ever identified
Mind & Meaning
In 1932, the Australian government deployed soldiers with two machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to wage war on roughly 20,000 emus destroying wheat crops in Western Australia — and after weeks of campaign, the soldiers had killed only a few hundred birds, in the only war on record in which birds officially won
Constellations
In 1962, a Mariner 1 probe bound for Venus was destroyed 293 seconds after launch because a single missing overbar in a line of guidance code told the rocket it was veering off course when it wasn't, and Arthur C. Clarke later called it the most expensive hyphen in history.
Mind & Meaning