Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
One country holds an estimated twenty-four trillion dollars in mineral wealth beneath its soil — cobalt and copper, the very metals that power the phones and electric cars of the modern world — and it remains among the five poorest nations on Earth
Psychology
Americans reported losing more than a billion dollars to romance scams in a single year — and it's older adults who lose the most, handing over far larger sums than younger victims to someone they never once met in person
Outer Planets
For all its serene blue beauty from afar, Uranus hides a detail that would make a visitor recoil: its cloud tops are laced with hydrogen sulfide, the very gas that gives rotten eggs their stench, so Uranus literally reeks
Technology
The flying taxi has been "five years away" for most of our lives, and then it arrived as something smaller — pilotless two-seaters are already selling sightseeing tickets in two Chinese cities and a premium airport shuttle is set to open in Dubai this year, the certificates real and the city commute still not on offer
Mind & Meaning
Off the coast of South Africa, orcas have learned to kill great white sharks with surgical precision — seizing a pectoral fin, eviscerating the shark in under two minutes, and taking one organ above all: the enormous, oil-rich liver, leaving most of the carcass behind
Mind & Meaning
Almost everything the movies taught you about Egypt's pyramids is wrong — not slaves but paid workers, not marooned in empty desert but built beside a river now vanished, not an undocumented mystery but a supply operation we can still read, day by day, in an inspector's own logbook from four and a half thousand years ago
Science
Phobos circles Mars so quickly that it completes more than three orbits per Martian day. Because it outruns the planet’s rotation, it rises in the west and sets in the east—the only known moon whose orbit is shorter than its planet’s day
Space Travel
On a February day in 1984 an astronaut did what no human had dared, with no safety line to hold him: Bruce McCandless flew free of the shuttle on a jetpack, drifting up to 100 metres out as the first human satellite
Technology
Voyager 2 flew so far below the plane of the solar system after Neptune that only one antenna on Earth can still send it commands, a 70-metre dish outside Canberra, which went offline for eleven months of repairs in 2020 while the spacecraft flew on in silence, unable to be told anything.
Psychology
We read the placebo trial behind the fake-supplement headlines: of 90 older adults in Milan, those told outright that their pills were sugar reported less stress than those deceived into thinking the pills were real — and the percentages in the university’s announcement are nowhere in the paper
Water World
The river that carved the Grand Canyon and waters tens of millions rarely finishes its own journey: the Colorado is now so heavily drained for farms and cities that it usually runs dry before it can ever reach the sea
Technology
Humanity consumes roughly 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel every year—more than any resource except water. Yet most wind-blown desert sand is too fine and rounded to form the main aggregate in strong concrete, forcing even desert cities such as Dubai to rely on carefully processed, quarried, marine or imported material for construction.
Science
NASA's Mars helicopter was built to prove that flight was possible in an atmosphere one percent as thick as Earth's, and it was expected to manage five flights over thirty days, but it flew 72 times across almost three years before a hard landing shattered its rotor blades, and it now sits where it landed, still recording the weather.
Deep Space
The Voyagers fly astonishingly fast, yet space is so vast it makes a mockery of their speed: aimed at the nearest star, one would still take more than 73,000 years to arrive, though in truth neither is even pointed that way
Science