Deep Space
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light
Science
In 1971, the Soviet probe Mars 3 became the first spacecraft to land softly on Mars. It survived the descent, began transmitting from the surface, and then went permanently silent after just 14.5 seconds — a failure that has never been fully explained.
Science
In the Martian sky, the sun appears roughly two-thirds the size it looks from Earth, and at sunset it glows blue rather than red — the same dust particles that make daytime skies pink on Mars scatter shorter wavelengths at dusk in exactly the opposite pattern to our atmosphere
Science
In 1610, Galileo pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four moons orbiting it — a direct contradiction of the idea that everything in the universe orbited Earth, and a moment that did more to end one model of the cosmos than any written argument had managed
Moon Daily
On the journey to the Moon, dark-adapted Apollo crews averaged one unexplained flash of light every 2.9 minutes — roughly 20 per hour — from something that had no business existing behind closed eyes
Science
A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head, dying eventually of thirst rather than injury, because its open circulatory system and body-wide breathing let it function long after decapitation would kill a mammal
Science
Mars once had a magnetic field strong enough to deflect solar wind, just as Earth's does now — when it collapsed, the planet lost its atmosphere and its oceans within a geologically brief period, transforming from a world that may have held life into the frozen desert it is today
Science
Dark matter is thought to make up roughly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet after nearly four decades of increasingly sensitive searches — from deep underground detectors to space-based observations — not a single dark matter particle has ever been directly confirmed.
Science
In the 1970s, Africa still held around 90,000 lions. Today, only about 20,000 to 25,000 remain — a collapse of roughly three-quarters in half a century — and the species now survives in less than 8% of the land it once roamed.
Science
A horse can destroy a human in a sprint, but over a brutal long haul in summer heat, Daniel Lieberman argues the advantage can flip: humans keep cooling themselves through sweat, while a horse’s larger body struggles to shed heat fast enough.
Science
Titan’s atmosphere is so dense and its gravity so weak that a person with the right winged suit could plausibly glide through its sky — and those same conditions make Titan one of the most forgiving large worlds in the solar system for a spacecraft to descend onto, even if the surface itself is colder than Antarctica by almost 100 degrees Celsius.
Science
The highest mountain on Earth is not the closest mountain to outer space — because the planet bulges outward at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits farther from the center of the Earth than Mount Everest does, even though Everest is much taller
Constellations
James Webb has found evidence for thick water-ice clouds on Epsilon Indi Ab, one of the closest Jupiter-like worlds we can study directly — a discovery that didn’t overturn every atmospheric model, but exposed how many of them had been leaving out the very thing now shaping the planet’s sky.
Constellations
In March 2025, Australia's new SKA-Low telescope photographed 85 galaxies using just 1,024 of its planned 131,072 antennas — less than one percent of its full power, and the image was already beyond what scientists hoped for
Science