Deep Space
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Aerospace
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth, returning a hero — but Soviet authorities had also prepared a statement in case he did not survive
Deep Space
Voyager's signal now reaches Earth as a whisper measured in fractions of a billionth of a watt, fainter than almost anything our antennas were built to hear
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Seneca: "What is more foolish than refusing to learn, simply because one has not been learning for a long time?"
Deep Space
Astronomers have found a super-Earth just 25 light-years away — close enough by cosmic standards that it sits in the small category of worlds scientists consider genuinely worth searching for signs of life
Outer Planets
Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is sealed beneath a shell of ice, but the ocean hidden below may contain twice as much liquid water as every ocean on Earth combined — and Jupiter’s gravity may have kept it liquid for billions of years
Human Behaviour
Spaceflight pushes fluid toward the head, flattening the back of the eye and blurring some astronauts' vision in ways that don't always fully recover
Earth News
Earth’s inner core is an iron-rich ball as hot as the surface of the Sun, kept solid only because the crushing pressure of the entire planet raises the temperature at which iron can melt
Exo Worlds
The most common type of planet discovered in the Milky Way may be a world that does not exist in our solar system — larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and wrapped in an atmosphere we barely understand
Physics News
The average human ingests roughly a credit card's worth of plastic every week — and the particles small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier measure under 300 nanometers
Earth News
The total weight of all the ants on Earth roughly rivals the combined weight of all wild mammals and birds — an estimated 20 quadrillion individuals, quietly moving more soil each year than earthworms
Earth Observation
Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives less precipitation than the Sahara, yet it holds about 70 per cent of the planet's fresh water, locked in an ice sheet averaging over two kilometres thick across the continent
Science
Einstein’s relativity allows time travel into the future, and we have already measured it: atomic clocks flown around Earth on aeroplanes came home showing a different time from clocks left on the ground
Science
A Mexican salamander that can regrow entire limbs does something stranger than healing — the axolotl reopens parts of its embryonic blueprint and uses it to rebuild what was lost
Solar Science
Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy inside a single photon can spend tens of thousands of years bouncing through the Sun's dense core before it ever escapes the surface to begin that eight-minute trip
Science