Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Mount Olympus has been Greece's highest peak, the mythological seat of twelve gods, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1981, and it has spent the last twelve years waiting to find out if that is enough for World Heritage status
Human Behaviour
Researchers tested an engineered enzyme on donated skin tissue and brought its chemical aging markers down to levels typically seen in 31-year-old skin, a separate test on a 75-year-old donor's arteries cut the same damage by more than seventy percent
Human Behaviour
Arthur Aron's 1997 study generated 36 questions that escalate in intimacy, and two strangers who worked through all of them in the lab reported feeling closer than many people do with lifelong friends
Human Behaviour
In 1921, Lewis Terman began tracking 1,528 gifted California children for life — and discovered the traits that predicted success had almost nothing to do with IQ
Space Travel
In May 1973, Skylab reached orbit with its heat shield torn away, one solar wing gone and the other jammed, leaving America’s first space station at roughly 54°C — so engineers built a parasol in days and astronauts carried it up to save the laboratory
Human Behaviour
We tend to blame the flat, on-rails feeling of adult life on tiredness or the job, but diary and brain research point to something else: predictability itself lets the days run without conscious attention
Science
Roughly 2% of the global population meets the clinical threshold for giftedness — and the same neural overexcitability that defines it drives sensory overwhelm in crowded rooms
Exo Life
In a cave 18 metres below the surface at Movile in Romania, sealed off from the outside world for 5.5 million years, biologists have found 48 species that live on hydrogen sulphide and have never seen sunlight
Deep Space
Proxima Centauri is the nearest star beyond the Sun, yet this red dwarf is normally invisible to the naked eye — except during a rare superflare
Constellations
In 2026, engineers at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands sealed Plato inside the Maxwell chamber and ran every one of its 26 cameras and subsystems at once to find out whether the spacecraft could survive its own electronics screaming at each other
Science
Sea otters carry a favourite rock in a loose pouch of skin under their left forearm and use it as an anvil to crack shellfish, and each otter tends to keep the same stone for years, sometimes for life
Human Behaviour
A person can nod calmly through terrible news, then find their hands shaking on the steering wheel an hour later — and the delay does not mean they were fine
Moon Daily
In July 1969, Buzz Aldrin pulled a small plastic pouch of wine and a wafer from his personal preference kit inside the Eagle lander, poured the wine into a chalice given to him by his Presbyterian church in Texas, and took Communion on the surface of the Moon in the six hours before Armstrong opened the hatch — a private ceremony NASA asked him not to broadcast because of a lawsuit still pending from Apollo 8's reading of Genesis
Human Behaviour
In the 1990s, neuroscientist Stephen Porges proposed the polyvagal theory — the idea that an ancient nerve slams the body into stillness when fighting and fleeing are both off the table
Stellar Chemistry