Early Earth
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
We tend to think of Jupiter as permanently giant, but a 2025 study found it used to be twice its current size, with a magnetic field 50 times more powerful, and it is still quietly shrinking by about 2 centimetres every year
Mind & Meaning
Experienced birdwatchers were found to have denser, more structurally complex brain tissue in regions linked to attention and perception, and when shown birds they had never seen before, those same regions activated most strongly
Cosmology
We tend to think of the universe as roughly uniform, with galaxies scattered in every direction — but the Boötes Void, discovered in 1981 during a redshift survey, is a vast cosmic underdensity up to 330 million light-years across, containing only a few dozen known galaxies where thousands might otherwise be expected
Science
For 21 years, Voyager 1’s primary roll thrusters were considered dead. Then in 2025, NASA tried to wake them up from 15 billion miles away — knowing that if they fired cold, they could explode, but if they stayed dead, the spacecraft might one day lose its aim at Earth forever.
Science
The Sturtian glaciation, the longest Snowball Earth event, lasted about 57 million years — almost as long as the age of mammals after the dinosaurs vanished — yet new research from Scottish rocks shows that during at least one brief “slushy” interval, seasons, solar cycles and even El Niño-like rhythms were still pulsing through the frozen planet.
Space Scopes
A planet nearly 700 light-years away has mineral clouds that form every morning and completely vanish by nightfall — a daily weather cycle made of rock, confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope in May 2026
Science
Scientists initially weighed the planet GJ 3378b at 5.3 Earth masses, a number that made it a likely gas world with crushing pressure — but 137 fresh telescope measurements revised that down to 2.3, nudging it across the boundary into rocky, potentially life-bearing territory
Psychology
Between the mid-teens and the mid-twenties, the human brain records an unusually rich collection of memories—not because it works better than before or after, but because life is packed with firsts that rarely happen again.
Science
A Jupiter-sized planet outlived its dying star, and NASA’s Webb has now read its atmosphere — the first ever detected on a world orbiting a white dwarf
Deep Space
There is a cliff on a small moon of Uranus that is approximately 20 kilometres from top to bottom, which is roughly 24 times taller than the Burj Khalifa and 11 times deeper than the Grand Canyon, and where a person who fell off the top would take approximately 12 minutes to hit the bottom, at which point the fall might actually be survivable
Science
A single ten-month run added 161 gravitational-wave detections and pushed the total ever recorded to 390 — including two mergers that may be black holes built from earlier black holes
Science
On 13 April 2029, a 375-metre asteroid called Apophis will sweep past Earth closer than many telecommunications satellites — and, under clear dark skies, around two billion people across Europe, Africa and parts of Asia may be able to watch it move across the night sky with the naked eye.
Psychology
The 'Mozart effect' began as a fifteen-minute bump on one spatial-reasoning test taken by 36 college students, then grew into a national belief that classical music makes babies smarter
Aerospace
During NASA's astronaut selection process, psychologists deliberately interrupt candidates, criticise correct answers, impose impossible time limits, and tell candidates they solved problems wrong when in fact they solved them correctly, in a specific set of interview tactics designed to identify the one psychological trait that determines who becomes an astronaut and who does not
Science