Outer Planets
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
A 2026 study found that Jupiter's ocean moon Europa may have a geologically quiet seafloor with little active faulting — meaning the vast hidden ocean long treated as our best bet for alien life may lack the very energy that life would need to survive
Constellations
Nearly a millennium ago sky-watchers recorded a new star so bright it was visible in daylight for weeks, and Hubble has now traced how far its remnant, the Crab Nebula, has expanded since — a thousand-year-old explosion still visibly unfolding
Science
Two humpback whales were tracked crossing more than 14,000 kilometres between breeding grounds in Australia and Brazil — one of them shattering every migration record ever recorded for the species
Stellar Chemistry
In March 2026, a strange 'chirp' from a distant dying star proved to be something never seen so clearly before: the birth of a magnetar — a newborn neutron star so magnetic it could wipe every credit card on Earth from halfway to the Moon
Mind & Meaning
For nearly five decades, psychologist Francine Patterson taught a western lowland gorilla named Koko a modified sign language — and Koko reportedly learned more than 1,000 signs, understood 2,000 spoken words, and mourned when her kitten was killed by a car
Constellations
James Webb has caught at least five galaxies colliding about 800 million years after the Big Bang, flinging heavy elements out into space far earlier than any model predicted — evidence the early universe was already messy and mature when it should still have been simple
Mind & Meaning
The Golden Triangle — the remote borderland where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet — once produced more than half the world's heroin, not through cartels or kingpins but through a patchwork of ethnic armies that found opium more reliable than any government
Science
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is spraying a hidden ocean into space — and inside that spray is the same chemical fuel that feeds life in Earth’s deepest oceans
Science
The largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia was hiding in plain sight near a pond in northeastern Thailand — mistaken for ordinary rocks until researchers confirmed it as a 27-tonne, 27-metre sauropod
Psychology
Brain scans found that mothers looking at their own dogs activated some of the same attachment networks as when they looked at their own children — evidence that the bond between humans and pets is biologically real
Mind & Meaning
In 2017, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River after a 140-year Māori campaign — recognizing it not as property, but as an ancestor with the rights of a legal person
Mind & Meaning
In 1980, China's economy was about the size of the Netherlands'. By 2010 it had overtaken Japan. By 2023 it was producing roughly eighteen per cent of everything the world makes — all within a single human lifetime
Constellations
On July 10, 2026, China caught the falling first stage of a Long March 10B in a net strung across a ship at sea, becoming only the second nation ever to recover an orbital-class booster, and it now plans to fly the very same stage again before the year is out
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from the father of American psychology, William James: "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook"
Science