Pollution
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Eclipses
On the evening of 12 August 2026, a total solar eclipse will sweep across Spain at sunset. Hours later, beneath a moonless sky, the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak—placing two of astronomy’s most dramatic events within a single extraordinary night.
Science
Deep beneath Svalbard in a frozen Norwegian mountain, a vault holds seeds from almost every food crop on Earth: not as a museum piece, but as the working backup for the world's fragile seed banks
Exo Life
The case for Enceladus as a potentially habitable world does not rest on speculation alone: sodium salts point to an ocean that has interacted with rock, molecular hydrogen reveals a potential chemical energy source, and phosphorus—the long-missing essential ingredient—has been detected in ice grains expelled from its ocean
Water World
The largest waterfall on Earth is hidden beneath the ocean between Greenland and Iceland, where cold water plunges more than three kilometres down the seafloor at 3.5 million cubic metres per second
Exo Worlds
Astronomers found a planet 63 light-years away that appears as blue as Earth from space—but its colour comes from a scorching atmosphere where glass may rain sideways in 4,500-mile-per-hour winds
Constellations
The ISS toilet costs $23 million and separates urine into a centrifuge that recycles 98% of it back into drinking water — a closed-loop system that took NASA 40 years to perfect
Science
Every winter, a single beluga whale in the Arctic will dive to 700 metres and stay under for 25 minutes on a lungful of air compressed to 1/70th its surface volume, sustained by muscles so oxygen-rich they run nearly black when cut
Saturn Daily
On Saturn's moon Titan, molecules that chemistry says should never mix are mixing — NASA and Chalmers University researchers found that at minus 183 degrees Celsius, substances as incompatible as water and oil can dissolve into each other
Moon Daily
After Apollo astronauts tracked Moon dust into their cabin, it clogged seals, scratched their visors and left one crew member sneezing with “lunar hay fever”—yet they all agreed the dust smelled strangely like spent gunpowder
Flora And Fauna
We assume a cat's meow is simply how cats 'talk', but adult cats almost never meow at one another: the sound is aimed squarely at us, a call kittens make to their mothers that housecats have repurposed purely to manage humans
Exo Worlds
Astronomers assumed the lava planet 55 Cancri e, just 41 light-years away, had no atmosphere worth studying — James Webb found instead that its molten interior is actively exhaling a hydrogen-rich atmosphere, the gases bubbling up from a planetary-scale ocean of magma
Mercury Rising
Temperatures on Mercury’s sunlit surface can reach 430 degrees Celsius—yet inside polar craters where sunlight has never fallen, spacecraft have found evidence of ancient water ice
Saturn Daily
In March 2025, astronomers confirmed 128 new moons around Saturn in a single day, nearly doubling its count to 274 — more moons than every other planet in the solar system combined
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."
Launch Pad