Psychology
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see."
Mind & Meaning
Cats can't taste sweetness — evolution turned off the relevant gene in their distant ancestors when they became obligate carnivores, and without working sweet receptors, a cat is as indifferent to sugar as a person is to ultraviolet light
Aerospace
A particle just passed through the Mediterranean carrying 220 petaelectronvolts of energy — roughly twenty times more than any neutrino ever recorded before it, and scientists still aren't sure where it came from
Mind & Meaning
In a 1999 experiment, people were asked to watch a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed. Around half of them completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit stroll into the middle of the scene
Exo Worlds
About 63 light-years away there is a deep-blue world that looks deceptively like Earth from a distance, but on the planet HD 189733b the temperature reaches 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the winds scream at thousands of miles an hour
Constellations
In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from another star system passing through our own: a strange, elongated visitor called ‘Oumuamua that seemed to accelerate as it left, in a way scientists are still debating
Aerospace
Rocket debris that has been drifting in low Earth orbit since the 1960s just helped scientists find something they had missed for decades — a specific threshold in solar activity past which space junk starts falling toward Earth measurably faster
Science
Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus — the gap between T. rex and the present day is about 66 million years, while the gap between T. rex and Stegosaurus is about 83 million years, which means T. rex would have seen Stegosaurus as an ancient creature in the same way we see T. rex now
Science
There is a species of jellyfish that is essentially immortal — Turritopsis dohrnii, which can revert from its adult form back to its juvenile polyp stage when stressed or injured, and then mature again, potentially repeating the cycle indefinitely, in the only known case of a complex animal that can reverse its own aging process
Science
Honeybees can recognize human faces — they can be trained to distinguish between individual humans by face and continue to recognize them across different viewpoints, despite having a brain smaller than the head of a pin
Science
There is a fish that can live more than a hundred years — the rougheye rockfish, which inhabits the deep waters of the North Pacific — and the slow rate at which it grows, breeds, and ages means that some of the individuals being caught by fishermen today were already swimming the same waters during the American Civil War
Science
There are about 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment — enough that their combined biomass outweighs every wild bird and mammal on the planet combined, even though the often-repeated claim that ant biomass equals human biomass has been overturned by recent research
Science
Bananas are slightly radioactive — they contain potassium-40, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope, and the radiation dose from eating one banana is so consistently measurable that nuclear scientists use it as an informal unit of measurement, called the "banana equivalent dose," for explaining low-level radiation exposure to the public
Science
Deep beneath our feet, Earth’s inner core is thought to be roughly as hot as the surface of the Sun — around five and a half thousand degrees Celsius — yet the crushing pressure keeps it solid.
Constellations