Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Flora And Fauna
A gray wolf's rear teeth can generate more than twice the bite force of a domestic dog's, and the skull geometry behind it helps the predator process the bones of elk-sized prey
Science
The pistol shrimp snaps its claw so fast it creates a collapsing cavitation bubble nearly as hot as the Sun’s surface — and kills with the shockwave, not the claw
Mind & Meaning
Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.”
Mind & Meaning
Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is marketed as the city of the future, but it is being built on land with a long human past — including Huwaitat communities whose displacement has become one of the project’s darkest controversies
Human Behaviour
I put six minutes of birdsong through my headphones during the worst week of the year and something in my chest actually loosened
Psychology
The handshake is said to have begun as proof of an empty hand, no weapon and no immediate threat, and for thousands of years that simple clasp has carried a message spoken greetings still cannot: I come in peace
Mind & Meaning
Yawning may be the brain's way of cooling itself: in one experiment, people watching others yawn were far less likely to yawn when a cold pack was pressed to their forehead, but not when the pack was warm
Spacemart
In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else's constellation
Mind & Meaning
Bhutan’s king voluntarily gave up absolute power and turned his kingdom into a democracy — but many of his people begged him not to, trusting the monarchy more than the politicians who would replace it
Constellations
In July 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into polar orbit for the Pentagon's Golden Dome mesh network, a constellation designed to be too numerous to destroy, yet the laser links meant to weave those satellites into a single battle network are still switched off in orbit, months behind schedule
Human Behaviour
Sociologist Erving Goffman argued in 1956 that everyone runs a front stage and a back stage self, and that the strain most people feel in company is the cost of keeping the performance from slipping
Mind & Meaning
In 1936, a British king gave up the throne for love, but the woman he chose, Wallis Simpson, was so unsuitable that the romance tore open the monarchy's rules from the inside
Constellations
The North Star is not the brightest star in the sky — not even close: Polaris ranks around 48th, far outshone by Sirius and dozens of others; what makes it special is only that it sits almost over the North Pole
Psychology
In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones invented a movement called The Third Wave to answer a student's question — and by day four, 200 teenagers were saluting him in the halls and informing on classmates who refused
Human Behaviour