Psychology
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Russian scientists in Siberia have brought a 24,000-year-old microscopic animal back to life — a tiny creature called a bdelloid rotifer, frozen in Arctic permafrost since the last Ice Age — and after thawing, it began moving, eating, and reproducing as if no time had passed, in research suggesting that some forms of life can survive in a kind of suspended animation for tens of thousands of years
Mind & Meaning
The Sahara Desert was a green savanna with rivers, hippos, and giraffes as recently as 6,000 years ago — and within roughly a century, the entire region collapsed into the arid desert we know today, in a climate transition so abrupt that the cave paintings made by people who lived through it survived on rock walls long after the lakes they painted had vanished
Human Behaviour
In 1991, a hiker in the Italian Alps discovered the frozen body of a man who had been murdered approximately 5,300 years ago — with an arrow still embedded in his back — and modern analysis has since identified his last meal, his tattoos, and the genetic signatures of descendants still alive in Austria today
Mind & Meaning
The lowest natural temperature ever recorded on Earth was minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, measured at Antarctica's Vostok research station in 1983 — cold enough that a cup of boiling water thrown into the air freezes before it hits the ground, exhaled breath crystallizes audibly into ice fog, and steel becomes brittle enough to shatter on impact
Deep Space
There is a black hole sitting roughly 10 billion light-years away from Earth, called TON 618, with a mass about 66 billion times that of our Sun — more massive than every star in the Milky Way galaxy combined — and its outer edge stretches across a region of space roughly 30 to 40 times wider than our entire solar system
Mind & Meaning
A single plastic water bottle takes about 450 years to decompose — meaning every bottle produced since the 1970s is still essentially intact somewhere on Earth, slowly breaking down into particles now found in Arctic ice, Pyrenees rainfall, and the sediments of the Mariana Trench
Psychology
We move through the day convinced everyone notices our flaws, but when psychologists made students walk into a crowded room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, the wearers guessed nearly half the room would remember the face on the shirt, and barely a quarter actually did.
Psychology
The kind of sentence that means nothing until the day it suddenly means everything: "Maybe the moon is only beautiful because it is so far away."
Earth Observation
Singapore's Marina Barrage transformed a polluted tidal estuary into a freshwater reservoir in the heart of the city in 2008, holding back the sea with a dam so the captured rainwater could supply drinking water and tame floods in the downtown core
Science
On Neptune and Uranus, the crushing pressure thousands of miles down is thought to tear methane apart and squeeze the loose carbon into showers of solid diamond, and in 2017 physicists recreated the exact reaction in a laboratory
Earth Observation
The Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait grow so shallow in places that fully laden supertankers carrying a quarter of the world's seaborne oil are required to keep at least three and a half metres of water beneath their keels — about the height of a one-storey room — and squat and swell can quietly shave even that
Asia News
In 2003, Seoul tore down a six-lane elevated highway, restored a buried stream that had not seen sunlight in fifty years, and recorded a 639 per cent increase in local biodiversity within three years, while air pollution dropped by 35 per cent and average travel times in the surrounding area improved despite the removal of a major roadway.
Mind & Meaning
Across two 16-week experiments, researchers tested whether people can deliberately reshape their personality, and found that those who set a goal to change a Big Five trait measurably did
Mind & Meaning
A cave in the Pyrenees at 7,330 feet above sea level contained 23 ancient fireplaces, traces of a child, and green stones that prehistoric people appear to have been climbing up there to process as copper ore for over 4,000 years
Human Behaviour