Water Worlds
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 859 articles · Back to full archive
Outer Planets
The bright nitrogen ice plain forming the left lobe of Pluto's heart has not a single impact crater anywhere on it, which tells planetary scientists the surface is being churned from below and completely replaced on a cycle short enough that parts of that ground are younger than our own species
Mind & Meaning
Quote of the day: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
Government
In 1948 Costa Rica did something almost no state has ever done voluntarily; it abolished its army. The money went into schools and hospitals instead, and the country now runs on almost entirely renewable electricity
Water World
Singapore has almost no fresh water of its own and buys much of it under a deal that runs out in 2061, so it built its way out — recycled sewage now supplies up to forty per cent of the country's water, and the target is fifty-five per cent by 2060
Whales Ahoy
In 2020 scientists tracking a beaked whale logged a dive that seemed physically impossible: 3 hours and 42 minutes underwater on a single lungful of air, by far the longest dive ever recorded in any mammal on Earth
Political Economy
In 1945 Japan lay flattened and starving, yet within a single generation its economy had climbed to second-largest on Earth, overtaking West Germany by 1968 — barely 23 years after total defeat had left its cities in ash and its people near famine
Science
The deep cobalt Neptune everyone recognises is largely an artefact of image processing, and when researchers reprocessed the Voyager 2 data with modern calibration they found Neptune and Uranus are almost the same pale greenish blue, with Neptune only marginally darker than its supposedly boring neighbour
Mind & Meaning
Nutmeg was once one of the most coveted spices on earth, grown on a single cluster of Indonesian islands, and the hunger for it helped redraw the map of the world — it's the reason New Amsterdam became New York, swapped away by the Dutch to close out England's last claim on a nutmeg island they already held
Mind & Meaning
Ultra-processed foods now make up almost sixty percent of what the average American eats, and a tightly controlled study suggests that isn't really a matter of willpower — fed processed food, people ate five hundred extra calories a day without meaning to
Aerospace
You would expect astronauts to shrug off something as ordinary as plain travel sickness, but no: in fact most feel queasy for their first days in orbit, a common bout called space adaptation syndrome, and even veteran pilots get it
Mind & Meaning
In eighteenth-century Britain a single pineapple could cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars, so rare and coveted that people didn't eat them — they rented them, carrying the same fruit from party to party as a centerpiece to display their wealth
Mind & Meaning
There's a group of seventeen obscure metals called the rare earths, tucked inside every smartphone, electric car, wind turbine, and guided missile — and a single country, China, mines about 70 percent of them and refines close to 90, a chokehold on modern technology few people realize exists
Mind & Meaning
The blade that lay against King Tut's mummy for three thousand years turned out to be extraterrestrial — its metal matches the composition of meteorites, meaning the boy king was buried with a weapon forged from iron that fell from the sky
Psychology
Jet pilots had a word for the feeling of coming loose from the earth at high altitude, and when two researchers put the question to 137 of them in the mid-1950s, 35 per cent said they had felt it and two-thirds of that group had never told another pilot
Science