Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Research suggests East Asian skin often shows visible wrinkling later than Caucasian skin — partly because of a thicker, collagen-rich dermis, but mostly because more melanin slows sun damage
Constellations
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 followed in 2018, yet both encountered the edge of the heliosphere at almost the same distance from the Sun—121.6 and roughly 119 astronomical units—even though they crossed in different directions and during very different phases of the solar cycle, a similarity Johns Hopkins scientists said they could not yet explain.
Science
Israel’s Beresheet lander crashed into the Moon in 2019 carrying several thousand tardigrades in a dehydrated, dormant state—and although later experiments suggest they probably did not survive the impact, nobody knows whether any remain intact enough to be revived if they were ever recovered and rehydrated.
Human Behaviour
Falling in love with a machine is no longer science fiction: about one in five American adults says they have chatted with an AI built to act as a romantic partner, and among young men it is nearly one in three
Technology
Bots have overtaken humans on one of the internet's largest networks — for the first time, agentic AI is pushing web-page requests past the halfway line
Technology
The average American now spends over three hours a day on a phone, checking it nearly 200 times — roughly once every five waking minutes — a rhythm of attention no earlier generation ever knew
Technology
A century before the first computer existed, a young Englishwoman wrote what is now called the first algorithm for a machine that was never even built — and foresaw that such engines might one day compose music, not merely crunch numbers
Human Behaviour
Only about one in five workers worldwide feels truly engaged at work, a 2026 Gallup report finds, a slide to its lowest level since 2020 that it estimates costs the world economy close to a tenth of its total output in lost productivity every year
Earth Observation
On July 1, 2026, the company once known as Maxar began selling 3D maps of Earth it can refresh within a day or sharpen to 15 centimeters, built less for people to study than for the autonomous drones and weapons that navigate by matching their cameras against the terrain
Space Medicine
Returning astronauts describe pain in the soles of the feet and lower back within days of landing — the spine suddenly forced to support half the body's weight again after months of weightlessness
Space Medicine
In 1973, Buzz Aldrin published a memoir admitting that coming home from the Moon had nearly destroyed him, breaking a code of silence inside the astronaut office where psychological difficulty was something you flew through rather than something you were ever allowed to name
Human Behaviour
For most of history the worry was too many people, yet by 2050 some 155 of the world's 204 countries will not have enough babies to sustain their populations, a Lancet study projects — a quiet reversal of the fear that defined the last century
Space Medicine
The inner-ear organs that tell your brain which way is down work every second of your life without you noticing — until orbit switches them off, and there is no gravity left for them to measure
Space Scopes
Brain scans of ISS astronauts show the organ quietly re-weighting its own senses during six months in orbit — turning down the silent inner ear and leaning almost entirely on the eyes to build a world with no down
Tech Space