Outer Planets
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Marsdaily
The Grand Canyon looks vast until you set it beside Valles Marineris on Mars, a single rift so long it would stretch clear across the United States and in places plunges up to seven kilometres deep, making it the largest canyon in the solar system
Space Travel
How did a captured German rocket, launched from a New Mexico desert in 1946, produce the first photograph of Earth from space using a 35mm camera bolted into its nose cone?
Moon Daily
Finding no evidence of life in Enceladus’s ocean could be almost as scientifically important as finding it — because a world with liquid water, internal heat, phosphorus and complex organic chemistry but no detectable biology would suggest that the ingredients for life are far easier to assemble than life itself
Flora And Fauna
Scientists recorded more than 50 days of deep-ocean footage before a goblin shark appeared for just over 20 seconds near the Tonga Trench, one of the first two confirmed sightings of this 125-million-year lineage alive in its natural habitat
Science
At the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the air is so thin and so dry that astronomers can see light from galaxies billions of light-years away with a clarity impossible at sea level — which is why 11 countries have built 13 major telescopes on what is technically a dormant volcano
Science
The Southern Delta Aquariids peak around July 30, but a nearly full Moon drowns all but the brightest meteors — so the dark mornings the week before are the ones to watch
Science
We tend to think Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, but if you measure from the centre of the planet rather than from sea level, a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo wins by more than two kilometres
Mind & Meaning
Daniel Kahneman spent a lifetime studying judgment and distilled one warning into a single sentence: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it"
Mind & Meaning
Cats sleep between 12 and 16 hours a day not because they are lazy but because their hunting strategy requires explosive short-burst energy — and a body that can sprint at nearly 50 kilometres per hour needs most of the day to prepare for a few seconds of effort
Exo Worlds
NASA's Webb telescope wasn't looking for a new planet around Beta Pictoris — it was studying a known one — and found a giant world, Beta Pictoris d, lurking 63 light-years away inside a debris disk that had blocked every conventional search for more than a decade
Mind & Meaning
Every Antarctic winter, male emperor penguins stand for more than two months in temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius, balancing a single egg on their feet — and eating nothing the entire time
Culture
The man whose codebreaking may have helped to shorten the Second World War by two years met a grim reward: in 1952 Alan Turing was convicted simply for being gay and chemically castrated; a royal pardon came only in 2013, decades after his death
Psychology
A Yale psychologist asked 660 older adults in Ohio how they felt about growing older, then tracked them for more than 20 years, and found those with a positive view of aging lived about 7.5 years longer than those who dreaded it
Venusian Heat
A day on Venus is longer than its year — the planet turns so slowly, and backwards, that the Sun rises in the west and takes about 58 Earth days to cross the sky
Mind & Meaning