Culture
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
A polar bear’s fur looks white, but it contains no white pigment: its long guard hairs are transparent, hollow tubes that scatter light like crushed ice, while the skin underneath is black, helping absorb what little Arctic sunlight reaches it
Psychology
In 1967, a history teacher couldn't explain how ordinary Germans fell in behind the Nazis, so he showed his class instead, and within five days he had built a movement of two hundred students he could no longer control
Stellar Chemistry
The gold in your wedding ring might an origin far more violent than you think: much of the universe’s gold was likely forged when two neutron stars collided — an event bright enough to outshine hundreds of millions of Suns for days, in a burst astronomers call a kilonova
Aerospace
A glimpse of home was among the last images Voyager 1’s cameras ever sent. Just 34 minutes after taking the most distant photo of Earth ever, the cameras were powered off to conserve energy — going dark for good
Earth News
The Great Salt Lake is drying up, and as it pulls back it uncovers hundreds of square miles of lakebed laced with arsenic, sitting directly upwind of more than two million people
Mind & Meaning
The Korean War never officially ended: an armistice signed in 1953 paused the fighting, but no peace treaty followed, leaving the Korean Peninsula technically at war for more than seventy years
Materials
Roman concrete piers built along the Mediterranean coast 2,000 years ago are still standing, and the reason is that seawater seeping into the mix triggers a chemical reaction that grows crystals of aluminous tobermorite, making the walls stronger every century while modern concrete crumbles in decades
Marsdaily
Mars lost its magnetic field, and then the solar wind stripped its atmosphere, and then its oceans evaporated — three catastrophes unfolding across billions of years that turned a warm, wet world into a frozen desert half the size it was supposed to be
Saturn Daily
How did a moon smaller than Mars end up with rivers, rainfall and lakes without a single drop of water in any of them?
Climate Science
How does a rodent that weighs 20 kilos and builds mud walls raise a valley's water table by nearly a metre and store more carbon in the wet ground than the trees above it?
Psychology
For centuries, nostalgia was treated as a disease. Since the mid-2000s, psychologists have reframed it as a source of meaning and connection
Psychology
Relationship satisfaction at 50 predicted physical health at 80 better than cholesterol, a decades-long Harvard study found
Cosmology
What did astronomers find when they aimed a telescope at a patch of sky that looked completely empty and left it there for ten days?
Earth News
Elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa Park are being born tuskless at rates approaching 33% — a genetic signature of 15 years of civil-war ivory hunting that the population is now passing to its daughters
Science