Science
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
On May 11, 1997, the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down in a Manhattan office tower to play the final game of his rematch against an IBM computer called Deep Blue — and resigned in under an hour, in what may be the cleanest moment in modern history when a domain of human cognition quietly crossed over to a machine
Science
Harry Harlow gave infant rhesus monkeys a choice between a wire mother that could feed them and a soft cloth mother built for warmth and comfort. Again and again, the monkeys clung to the cloth mother, going to the wire one only when they needed milk — a finding that helped overturn the idea that love was just hunger in disguise.
Science
Astronomers thought Solar System comets gave us a fair sample of comet water, but interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has blown that idea open: its water carries over 30 times more heavy hydrogen than typical comets formed around our Sun, hinting that our own comet family may be the local oddball — not the cosmic rule.
Science
In 1909, the chemist Fritz Haber pulled a few millilitres of ammonia out of ordinary air in a Karlsruhe laboratory, and the reaction he started now supplies the nitrogen atoms in roughly half the protein inside every human body alive today
Constellations
In 2019, Canada launched three radar satellites that can see through Arctic cloud and polar darkness, and now, with the original trio seven years into a seven-year design life, Ottawa has handed MDA Space a C$688 million contract to build the replacement before the constellation starts to fail
Outer Planets
Astronomers at Cambridge have proposed that the galaxy may contain a vast and previously unrecognised population of habitable planets, characterised by a global liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen atmosphere, that exist across a far wider range of stellar conditions than Earth-like worlds and that may be substantially easier to detect signs of life on than the Earth analogues that astronomers have been searching for over the past three decades
Psychology
Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work
Science
Astronauts on the Moon, with no atmosphere above them, looked up and saw a white sun — the yellow colour we see from Earth is not the sun's real colour but an artefact our own atmosphere paints onto it by scattering blue wavelengths sideways into the sky
Aerospace
In June 2026, Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat launched a trade group in Washington to represent the non-geostationary satellite industry, and the dominant operator they pointedly left out, SpaceX, already runs roughly 22 times as many satellites in that orbit as all four founding members combined
Psychology
At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.
Mind & Meaning
On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft's controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone
Human Behaviour
Most people don't realize that men now entering their 70s are often being asked to discuss feelings they were raised to keep out of view
Mind & Meaning
In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met
Human Behaviour
In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 7,000-page classified Defense Department history that demonstrated four successive American presidents had systematically lied about the Vietnam War — leaked by a former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, who had spent 18 months secretly photocopying the documents in his office at night
Human Behaviour