Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Exo Life
With 30 minutes left in her submersible dive, geochemist Mengran Du steered toward one last stretch of the deep trenches between Russia and Alaska — and found life where almost no one expected it. Published in 2025, the discovery revealed a 2,500-kilometre ecosystem of clams and tubeworms as deep as 9,533 metres, powered not by sunlight but by methane and hydrogen sulfide seeping from the seafloor.
Science
For billions of years, Earth’s magnetic field may have been doing something unexpected: helping guide particles stripped from our upper atmosphere across the 385,000 kilometres to the Moon, where they became trapped in lunar soil — a 2025 finding that adds a surprising new argument for studying the regolith beneath a future Moon base.
Science
Voyager 1 will reach a new milestone in November 2026: it will be so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light will take a full 24 hours to reach it — a distance humanity’s most distant spacecraft crossed in just over 49 years of continuous flight.
Science
More than 8,000 people applied to become NASA astronauts in 2024, and just 10 were chosen — not simply the strongest or the fastest, but people who could master robotics, medicine, foreign languages, survival training, high-performance jets and the one skill space demands most: staying calm when nothing goes to plan.
Science
Asteroid 16 Psyche, a metal-rich world roughly 225 kilometres wide orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, may contain extraordinary amounts of iron and nickel — enough that back-of-the-envelope estimates have put its theoretical metal value at around $10,000 quadrillion, a number so vast it dwarfs the entire global economy.
Science
In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew 406,771 kilometres from Earth — farther than any humans in history — breaking the Apollo 13 record from 1970 not by landing on the Moon, but by looping around its far side on a free-return path while the Moon’s elliptical orbit carried them just a little farther from home.
Aerospace
In 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, he reported that on the descent he saw flames outside the porthole and briefly believed his capsule was burning up
Psychology
The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try
Science
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to launch in August 2026, is expected to discover around 100,000 exoplanets in a single mission — more than every telescope in the history of astronomy combined
Mind & Meaning
Olive oil, soybeans, yogurt, lentils, and kimchi were named the five healthiest foods in the world by Health Magazine in 2006 — a distinction that put a spicy Korean fermented cabbage on the same shelf as the pillars of Mediterranean cuisine
Human Behaviour
The United Arab Emirates was once a small federation of fishermen, pearl divers, and camel herders on the Arabian Peninsula with no formal government and no paved roads — and 60 years later, it hosts the tallest building on earth, one of the world's largest airlines, and a per-capita GDP higher than Japan
Human Behaviour
Norway, a country of 5.5 million people that discovered oil off its coast in 1969, has built the world's largest sovereign wealth fund — worth more than $2 trillion in 2026 and holding stakes in roughly 1.5 percent of all publicly listed shares on the planet — meaning every Norwegian citizen effectively owns nearly $400,000 of the fund on paper
Mind & Meaning
In 2021, Japan appointed a Minister for Loneliness — a Cabinet-level position officially responsible for developing national policy on social isolation — after years of speculation that isolation had become one of the country's most serious public-health issues
Mind & Meaning
Tattoo ink doesn’t just stay in the skin — a PNAS mouse study found pigments can reach nearby lymph nodes soon after contact, damage macrophages, and keep inflammation active for at least two months
Human Behaviour