Space Scopes
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
For years the rule seemed settled — money stops buying happiness past $75,000 a year — but one study of 1.7 million daily mood reports from 33,391 Americans found no such ceiling, only a steady climb
Science
In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into physical memory by threading copper wire through tiny magnetic cores by hand, and the women who did the stitching were called 'Little Old Ladies' on the factory floor even though they were holding the only program that could land a man on the Moon.
Constellations
In 2026, Airi Toida and Yuichiro Ezoe modeled a sub-10-kilogram X-ray telescope that could spend two years tracing oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and silicon across the Moon, toward the complete elemental map Apollo never delivered
Space Scopes
MIT engineers just collapsed the oldest tradeoff in satellite propulsion — one tank, two thrusters, and a quiet rewrite of how cubesats are designed
Constellations
At the University of Twente, Davoud Jafari's team flew 3D-printed nickel-titanium micropillars on a parabolic flight where gravity vanished for seconds at a time, testing whether an electric field alone could do the job everyone assumed only gravity could — lift boiling bubbles off a scorching surface before they smother it
Mind & Meaning
A Yale researcher measured how people felt about growing old, and what she found was surprising: those with a positive view of aging lived more than 7 years longer — a gap traced back to attitudes they'd recorded as much as 23 years earlier
Science
The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants in tropical forests, hijacks their nervous system to compel them to climb to a precise height and humidity, locks their mandibles onto a leaf vein, then sprouts a stalk from the ant's head to rain spores onto colony-mates passing below.
Mind & Meaning
Many of us see status-seeking as a shallow modern preoccupation, but research suggests the need to feel valued runs deeper than we think
Human Behaviour
The longest piece of music ever composed is being performed right now in a church in Germany — a piece designed to last 639 years, played on a special organ that holds each note for months or years at a time — and the performance, which began in 2001, is not expected to end until the year 2640
Psychology
People with the least competence in a given subject consistently rate themselves as the most competent — a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect, identified by Cornell psychologists in 1999 — in research that can quietly explain why the most confidently wrong people in any room are often the ones who know the least
Psychology
The single strongest predictor of late-life flourishing turns out to be not exercise, diet, or education — but how connected a person felt to their close relationships in their 50s, according to a Harvard study following more than 700 men (later expanding to their wives and children) for over 85 years that has begun to quietly redefine what dementia prevention actually looks like
Mind & Meaning
Around 240 BCE, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using only two sticks, two cities in Egypt, and the angle of their shadows at noon on the summer solstice — and his result came within about 2 percent of the modern measurement, in one of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in human history
Constellations
The next great space race may not be to plant flags, but to bring home the first untouched samples from Mars, Phobos, and ancient asteroids.
Mind & Meaning
Only 66 years separate the Wright Brothers' first 12-second powered flight in 1903 from the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969 — a span shorter than a single human lifetime — and the astronauts of Apollo 11 carried a small piece of wood from the original Wright Flyer's propeller with them to the lunar surface, in a quiet gesture acknowledging exactly how recent the entire arc of human flight actually is
Mind & Meaning