Constellations
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Since the first Japanese bullet train left Tokyo Station on October 1, 1964 — just nine days before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics — the Shinkansen has carried more than 10 billion passengers across 60 years of continuous high-speed operation, and has never had a single passenger fatality caused by derailment or collision in its entire history
Constellations
In 2008, Cassini skimmed past Enceladus’s south pole and flew straight through a plume of icy material erupting from cracks in the moon’s surface. The encounter lasted only minutes, but nearly two decades later, data from that flyby is still revealing new organic chemistry from an ocean hidden beneath the ice.
Science
For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.
Science
Researchers linked to Washington State University proposed in 2026 that salty, oxidant-rich ice on Europa’s surface could become dense and weak enough to detach and slowly sink through the moon’s ice shell — potentially carrying life-supporting chemistry down to the hidden ocean in as little as 30,000 years under the most favorable model conditions.
Science
Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus or Neptune: Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Nearly four decades later, no mission has returned, leaving many of the biggest questions those flybys raised — about the planets’ interiors, strange magnetic fields, rings, and moons — still unresolved.
Science
Scientists took one of the naked mole rat’s longevity tricks — a gene that helps it produce unusually protective hyaluronan — and put it into mice. The result: the mice lived longer, had less inflammation, and were more resistant to tumours.
Science
A McMaster University AI model called SyntheMol-RL designed a new antibiotic candidate by searching a chemical space of 46 billion possible compounds — a scale far beyond physical lab screens, which usually test hundreds of thousands to a few million molecules.
Science
We tend to think quantum tunnelling is a subatomic curiosity, but in 1984 and 1985 physicists at UC Berkeley showed that a superconducting electrical circuit big enough to hold in your hand could tunnel from one state to another — a discovery that won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Science
In 2018, low Earth orbit still had months of margin: if satellites stopped dodging one another, researchers estimate it could take 164 days before a catastrophic collision. By 2025, after the rise of megaconstellations, that margin had collapsed to just 5.5 days.
Science
A bowhead whale can live for more than 200 years, yet it appears unusually resistant to cancer — and its genome carries genetic changes that may help explain why. Researchers have found signs of enhanced DNA repair in bowhead cells, turning one of the Arctic’s oldest mammals into a serious model for understanding aging itself.
Science
In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves and heartbeat just two days after she and Carl Sagan agreed to marry, and NASA pressed that compressed minute onto Voyager's Golden Record as a private love letter now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth
Science
For decades, marine biologists have followed a lone whale in the North Pacific known as "52 Blue" because it sings at a frequency of 52 hertz — far higher than the great baleen whales it swims among — meaning that for its entire life it has been calling out into the dark in a voice that, as far as anyone knows, no other whale has ever answered
Human Behaviour
Morning light exposure in the first hour after waking shapes cortisol and alertness for the hours that follow — and most people in modern built environments are not getting it
Science
Nearly all of the internet's international data — the messages, calls, and searches that cross continents — travels through fibre-optic cables laid on a seafloor that has never been fully surveyed, running over terrain no human eye has seen
Constellations