Human Behaviour
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Astronauts returning from long stays in orbit say the smell of rain is almost too much to bear and a familiar street feels like something they are piloting rather than driving
Marsdaily
When Spirit’s front wheel failed on Mars, engineers drove the rover backwards and let the dead wheel scrape through the soil — accidentally uncovering bright silica that pointed to ancient hot springs or steam vents
Moon Daily
During Apollo 11’s final descent, the guidance computer flashed 1201 and 1202 alarms as it ran out of processing capacity — then repeatedly rebooted, discarded low-priority work and kept steering the lunar module towards the surface
Moon Daily
Cassini watched bright “islands” appear, disappear and reappear in Titan’s methane seas — and laboratory experiments suggest they may be fields of nitrogen bubbles fizzing out of solution as the alien lakes warm or mix
Moon Daily
Across Titan’s equator, winds have built dunes around 100 metres high and hundreds of kilometres long — but the grains are water ice coated in hydrocarbons that fell out of the moon’s orange atmosphere
Space Travel
Voyager 1 is still crossing interstellar space with six computers holding about 68 kilobytes of memory between them — less storage than a single compressed photograph on a modern phone
Space Travel
The lines etched into Voyager’s Golden Record cover point towards 14 pulsars whose spinning clocks reveal both where the Sun is and roughly when the spacecraft left — directions designed to work without relying on a single human language
Space Travel
In 1980, Voyager 1 flew close enough to Titan to reveal its thick nitrogen atmosphere — but the gravity-assist geometry bent the spacecraft permanently out of the planetary plane, trading Uranus and Neptune for one close look at Saturn’s largest moon
Science
Geologists have taught for decades that rivers needed plants to form their distinctive S-shaped meanders, but Stanford University researchers published a study in August 2025 showing that rivers were carving those curves long before vegetation existed on land
Flora And Fauna
When elephants play, they rapidly copy one another’s trunk and head movements — a form of bodily mimicry resembling the contagious smiles and laughter seen in humans
Flora And Fauna
Palaeontologists were preparing to leave the Egyptian desert when they noticed teeth protruding from the ground — and uncovered the skull of a 30-million-year-old apex predator
Moon Daily
Enceladus, a Saturn moon just 500 kilometres wide, fires geysers of water thousands of kilometres into space through cracks at its south pole — and that water carries the building blocks of life
Mercury Rising
Mercury is shrinking — as its iron core slowly cools, the whole planet has contracted by up to seven kilometres, wrinkling its surface into cliffs hundreds of miles long
Space Travel
In 2004 a NASA probe caught a comet's tail on a sheet of aerogel, flew the grains 4.6 billion kilometres home, and dropped them into the Utah desert — the first solid pieces of a comet ever returned to Earth
Science