Human Behaviour
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
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
In October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived just 53 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 465°C heat and 92-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those 53 minutes it sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — grainy, black-and-white, and showing sharp-edged rocks nobody had expected to still be intact.
Africa News
The Great Green Wall was pitched in 2007 as an 8,000-kilometre tree barrier — but 15 years in, only about 4% of the trees are actually in the ground
Space Scopes
Artemis 2, Apollo 8, and Overview Thinking
Science
Physics says time travel into the future is not a thought experiment — every astronaut who has orbited Earth has returned a fraction of a second younger than they would have been if they had stayed on the ground
Science
In November 2025, UC Irvine astronomers announced a rocky super-Earth called GJ 251 c orbiting in a habitable zone less than 20 light-years away — close enough that the next generation of ground-based telescopes may actually photograph it directly
Science
Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, but not for relativity. The Nobel Committee avoided honouring that still-controversial theory directly, and instead awarded him for his work on the photoelectric effect — the discovery that helped launch quantum physics.
Science
The International Space Station is not held up by rockets. It is falling constantly, in a precise arc that matches the curvature of Earth — a controlled fall that has continued without interruption since November 2000
Science
In nearly seventy years of deep-sea exploration, researchers compiled 43,681 submersible dive records — and found that humans have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, according to a Science Advances study published in May 2025.
Science