Human Behaviour
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 291 articles · Back to full archive
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
On July 7, a small Miami company called City Labs put a tritium-powered battery the size of a pencil eraser into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 — its softball-sized BOHR CubeSat becoming the first commercial spacecraft ever cleared to carry a nuclear power source under the FAA pathway built after a 2019 White House memo
Human Behaviour
Quote by Maya Angelou: “Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
GPS News
In 2012 a research team spoofed a drone out of the sky over a New Mexico missile range on a dare from the US government — proving a fake satellite signal could hijack navigation with off-the-shelf parts
Space Scopes
Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the ISS, and he has said the leaving was never the hard part — it was the coming back, when the balance and the strange detachment lingered for weeks after splashdown
Aerospace
A passenger jet 850 feet above the runway at Vilnius in January 2025 abandoned its landing when its instruments began quietly lying — nothing on the plane was broken, and it diverted to another country
GPS News
Spoofing a GPS receiver is worse than jamming it because the victim never knows — the screen stays calm and confident while feeding a pilot a runway that sits somewhere else entirely
GPS News
Todd Humphreys and his University of Texas team steered an $80 million superyacht off course in 2013 while its crew watched instruments that swore everything was fine — using gear costing a few thousand dollars
Nuclear Space
In July 2026, a Miami startup called City Labs sent a softball-sized CubeSat carrying a tritium battery into orbit on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare, becoming the first commercially built nuclear-powered satellite ever launched and the first mission ever cleared through the Federal Aviation Administration's new nuclear licensing process
Space Scopes