Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Science
In February 2023, a detector 3.5 kilometres beneath the Mediterranean caught the aftermath of the most energetic neutrino ever seen — a 220-petaelectronvolt ghost particle, roughly 16,000 times beyond CERN’s strongest collisions, with no confirmed source anywhere in the sky.
Science
A 2025 solid-state lithium–sulfur study hit about 505 Wh/kg at the cell level, and a Tsinghua quasi-solid-state battery reached 604 Wh/kg, more than double many conventional lithium-ion cells. If either chemistry survives the jump from lab to mass-produced EV packs, it could mean the same range with a much lighter battery, or far longer range without the extra weight.
Science
We tend to think the US is safely ahead in the new Moon race, but China has already put its Lanyue lander through simulated lunar landing and takeoff tests — then fired its Mengzhou crew capsule away from a Long March 10A prototype at maximum aerodynamic pressure, in an integrated abort-and-recovery demo that NASA’s expendable Space Launch System was never designed to match.
Science
We assumed humpback whales had to reach warm tropical waters before giving birth, but a 2025 UNSW-led study found newborn calves as far south as Tasmania — around 1,500 kilometres beyond the accepted calving zone — suggesting some mothers give birth mid-migration and keep swimming north with their calves.
Science
The record Apollo 13 set for the farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth was never meant to be a record — it was a survival manoeuvre after an explosion, and Artemis II quietly surpassed it on a clear April morning in 2026
Space Industry
SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets into orbit in 2025 — nearly one every other day — accounting for roughly 85% of all U.S. orbital launches and almost twice as many orbital launches as the entire nation of China managed that year.
Science
NASA has already watched dormant herpes viruses, including the one behind chickenpox and shingles, reactivate in astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Artemis II has now carried that question into deep space: more than 252,000 miles from Earth, the crew collected saliva samples to test whether radiation, isolation and distance trigger the same hidden immune response beyond low Earth orbit.
Mind & Meaning
On November 14, 2004, a Top Gun graduate named Commander David Fravor flying off the coast of San Diego encountered a smooth white 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac candy that hovered above a churning patch of ocean — and when he tried to close on it, the object mirrored his flight path and accelerated beyond visual range in seconds
Science
The little blue pill prescribed today around the world for erectile dysfunction was originally developed in the early 1990s by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain — and during the early trials, the male volunteers reported a side effect they were extremely reluctant to give up.
Psychology
Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer's disease
Science
In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet's interior
Science
For centuries, European sailors told stories of a sea monster called the kraken — a vast tentacled creature that dragged ships down into the deep — and although marine biologists confirmed in the 1850s that the kraken was a real animal they named the giant squid, no one managed to photograph a living one until two Japanese scientists succeeded in September 2004
Psychology
In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby's face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology
Science
In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans in history, reaching 406,771 kilometres from home — breaking a record Apollo 13 had held since 1970, without Artemis II ever landing on the Moon.
Science