Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Culture
The Great Pyramid was not built by slaves but by paid workers — skilled crews who lived in a purpose-built town beside the site, ate bread and beef, drank beer, and were buried in their own tombs of honour nearby
Space Scopes
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Webb is finding galaxies that look like they've been quietly forming stars for billions of years inside a cosmos that was, at the time of observation, only a few hundred million years old
Water World
The metal-rich nodules that mining firms hope to hoover off the deep-sea floor grow almost unimaginably slowly — on the order of a few millimetres every million years — so a potato-sized lump can take 10 to 20 million years to reach that size
Venusian Heat
On Venus, where the surface reaches 465 degrees Celsius and the air is sulphuric acid, scientists have proposed that microbial life could still survive — not on the ground, but drifting in the cloud layer 50 kilometres up, where temperatures and pressures are closer to a mild day on Earth
Marsdaily
As Mars’s atmosphere thinned and its surface became cold, dry and irradiated billions of years ago, any surviving microbial life may have found its last refuge underground. Yet the environments most capable of sheltering life could lie metres—or kilometres—below the surface, far deeper than any spacecraft has directly sampled.
Culture
The Great Pyramid looks like it has four flat faces, but each one is subtly dished inwards down the middle, making it secretly eight-sided — a detail so slight it was really only spotted from the air, in a photograph caught at the right angle of sunlight.
Saturn Daily
Titan may have volcanoes, but they would erupt something stranger than fire: a cold slush of water and ammonia welling up from below and freezing at the surface — 'cryovolcanism' that scientists suspect but have yet to confirm
Science
Honey is so hostile to bacteria that hospitals keep a sterilised, medical-grade version on hand for stubborn wounds and burns — the same chemistry that let honey in ancient tombs stay edible for millennia now helps modern skin heal
Science
Arctic ground squirrels drop their body temperature to nearly three degrees below freezing during hibernation — the coldest ever recorded in a mammal — a state that should crystallise their blood and kill them, but through a phenomenon called supercooling, their body fluids remain liquid, and they wake in spring unharmed
Climate Science
Almost every nation pumps more carbon into the air than it removes, but one small Himalayan kingdom does the exact reverse: Bhutan absorbs more carbon than it emits, a rare carbon-negative country that measures its success by Gross National Happiness
Science
At the start of winter, the wood frog of North America stops breathing, lets ice form in the spaces between its cells, and its heart stops entirely for up to seven months — then in spring it thaws, its heart restarts, and it hops away as if nothing happened
Mind & Meaning
By Al Pacino's own account, in the spring of 1971 Paramount executives tried three separate times to fire him from The Godfather during shooting, until Francis Ford Coppola shot the restaurant scene where Michael becomes a killer, and the studio saw what his restrained performance had been building toward
Deep Space
Somewhere in the Milky Way tonight, drifting through the darkness between the stars, there are roughly 20 planets for every sun that burns — trillions of worlds, most thought to be ejected from the solar systems where they were born and now wandering the galaxy, according to a nine-year microlensing survey
Human Behaviour
Dermatologists have long documented that the expressions worn most often across a lifetime eventually stop leaving the face and start staying — thousands of repetitions of the same smile, frown, or squint pulling the same muscles until the skin above them slowly loses the ability to return to neutral
Space Scopes