Earth Observation
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Earth Observation
Gold, platinum and most of Earth's heavy metals sank into the core as the young planet melted, and the gold we mine today likely arrived later in a rain of asteroids that struck after the core had already formed
Time And Space
The universe is supposed to have no preferred direction or special axis — yet the oldest light ever mapped contains two enormous patterns aligned with each other and strangely tied to the geometry of our own solar system, with some estimates putting the odds below 0.3% by chance
Asia News
On a Thursday in mid-November each year, South Korea grounds all commercial aircraft during the English listening section of its national college entrance exam, the Suneung — the stock market opens an hour late, military drills stop for the day, and police give free rides to students running behind
Culture
Carl Sagan's 1980 PBS series "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" has been broadcast in more than 60 countries and watched by an estimated 500 million people — making it the most widely watched series in American public television history until Ken Burns's The Civil War (1990)
Science
The Harvard astrophysicist best known for arguing that ʻOumuamua might have been alien technology has now been chosen to lead a new US government science council investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena — the unexplained objects most people still call UFOs
Outer Planets
Beneath Europa’s fractured ice may be an ocean containing more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, kept warm in complete darkness by the gravitational pull of Jupiter
Exo Worlds
Some objects that appear to be extraordinarily cold, dim stars could theoretically be energy-harvesting alien megastructures, and a new study says red dwarfs and white dwarfs offer some of the clearest places to search for their infrared heat
Tech Space
A satellite launched in 1958, no bigger than a grapefruit and silent since 1964, is still the oldest human-made object circling Earth — and it is expected to keep quietly orbiting overhead for another few centuries
Deep Space
NASA once reactivated Voyager 1 thrusters that had been unused for 37 years, sending commands across interstellar space to machinery built before many of the engineers operating it were born
Flora And Fauna
Dogs do not see the world in black and white: they see much as a red-green colourblind person does, in blues and yellows — reds and greens simply fade to murky browns and grey, but colour is very much there
Earth News
A park ranger lowered himself into an Australian canyon expecting to document an ordinary patch of rainforest and found a stand of trees that had been missing from the living world for millions of years
Cosmology
Vera Rubin watched stars at the edges of galaxies moving far faster than visible matter could explain and found one of the clearest early signs that most of the universe is made of something we cannot see
Exo Worlds
We tend to assume Earth is a rare cosmic fluke, but a full analysis of NASA's Kepler data found at least 300 million rocky, habitable-zone planets around Sun-like stars in the Milky Way alone — and that is the conservative count
Psychology
Elephants communicate through vibrations in the ground at frequencies below human hearing, and researchers have shown other elephants can not only feel these signals through their feet but tell a familiar caller from a stranger
Mind & Meaning