Human Behaviour
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Apollo 13 set the record for the farthest humans had travelled from Earth by accident in 1970, after an explosion forced it into an emergency loop around the Moon. Artemis II broke it by design in April 2026, flying exactly 4,101 miles farther — then proposing names for two lunar craters as the crew passed overhead
Science
The most common type of planet in the known galaxy is one that does not exist in our solar system — a world larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, a size our own neighbourhood entirely skipped, now counted in the thousands across NASA's confirmed exoplanet archive
Venusian Heat
NASA has calculated, to the precise second, when Voyager 1 will be exactly one light-day from Earth: 2:16 a.m. on 18 November 2026, at a distance of 16,094,799,096 miles — a number that would have been science fiction when the probe launched in 1977
Venusian Heat
We tend to think of comets as ancient relics of our own solar system, but interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS carried 30 times more heavy hydrogen than any comet formed around our Sun, a chemical fingerprint pointing to a birthplace so cold and so old it may predate the Sun itself
Water World
The longest mountain range on Earth is one almost nobody has ever seen: it winds some 65,000 km around the globe like the seam on a baseball, and more than ninety percent of it lies hidden beneath the sea
Climate Science
Since 1978, China has planted 66 billion trees to hold back two deserts, and the planted forest is now gaining leaf cover faster than the country's natural woodland
Human Behaviour
The Zeigarnik effect helps explain why unfinished goals can feel louder than completed ones, but modern research suggests the mind’s pull toward open loops is far more conditional than the famous story implies
Science
You do not lose most body heat through your head: it leaks only about a tenth, roughly its share of your skin — the myth traces to a 1950s test in which participants were bundled up warm but left bare-headed
Space Industry
For years astronomers kept finding rocky planets in habitable zones and then discovering they were bare, airless cinders. LHS 1140b, announced Thursday in the journal Science, is the first one that isn't: it has an atmosphere, a surface temperature that allows liquid water, and a quiet enough star to keep both
Space Travel
On July 16, 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into orbit for the Pentagon's first operational low Earth orbit data network, pushing the constellation to half its planned size, even as the optical laser mesh that is supposed to let those satellites talk to one another remains dark and unproven
Science
A 2025 MIT-led study mapped 32,000 skills across 923 occupations and found current AI tools can already perform work representing 11.7 per cent of America’s entire wage bill — about $1.2 trillion a year
Earth News
When the Dutch ship Roggeveen anchored off Easter Island on Easter Sunday 1722, its crew counted between 2,000 and 3,000 islanders living beside 900 standing statues nobody could explain
Psychology
That adorable 'guilty look' your dog gives you is probably not guilt at all: in one experiment, dogs looked just as 'guilty' when they were entirely innocent — the hangdog face is a response to your scolding, not a real confession of any crime
Human Behaviour
A famous spotlight-effect experiment by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues found students thought twice as many people noticed an embarrassing T-shirt as actually did; the audience you rehearse for is often barely watching
Mind & Meaning