Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Aerospace
NASA's Psyche spacecraft used Mars as a free slingshot on 15 May 2026, gaining 1,000 miles per hour in speed and tilting its orbital plane by one degree, all without firing a thruster, to put it on course for a metal world that may be a planet's exposed iron core
Mind & Meaning
Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that peace turns on one distinction, and it isn't optimism — it's the dichotomy of control, learning to want only what is already yours to give
Technology
AI did not just demand more electricity — it demanded water. By 2025, U.S. data centres, increasingly expanded for AI workloads, were consuming nearly one trillion litres of water a year, much of it used in cooling systems that shed heat by evaporating water into the air.
Science
In 1610, Galileo spotted a small, smooth moon circling Jupiter and wrote it down; four hundred years later, scientists confirmed it likely holds the largest ocean in the solar system, buried under ice and never once touched by sunlight
Deep Space
We tend to think of Earth as almost impossibly rare, but a University of British Columbia study using Kepler data estimated that the Milky Way could contain as many as six billion rocky, roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of stars like our Sun — not proven Earth twins, but billions of worlds with at least the basic size, star, and distance that make Earth possible.
Mind & Meaning
Pooling 10 UK studies of 1,252 people, researchers found that exercising outdoors in nature tended to lift mood and self-esteem — with the biggest self-esteem gains from just five minutes, and settings with water outperforming green-only ones
Science
Solar storms puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere enough to drag a $500 million NASA space telescope toward destruction, so engineers built a $30 million robotic rescuer in less than a year and launched it to grab the telescope before it burns up.
Science
The oldest known image of the cosmos is a Bronze Age disc of bronze and gold, dug from a German hilltop by looters and recovered three years later in a Swiss police sting
Mind & Meaning
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name
Mind & Meaning
Japan's pachinko parlors, at their 1994 peak, generated more revenue every year than the country's entire automobile export industry — and roughly 80 percent of them are owned by ethnic Koreans, whose grandparents were brought to Japan as workers during the colonial occupation of Korea
Mind & Meaning
In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people's parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties
Mind & Meaning
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls
Mind & Meaning
Between 1849 and 1874, roughly 100,000 Chinese men from Guangdong province were shipped to Peru under contracts they could not read, to work the coastal guano islands and the sugar plantations — and the fusion cuisine their descendants would eventually create is why the city of Lima today has more than 6,000 Chinese-Peruvian restaurants called chifas
Mind & Meaning
After the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis nearly bankrupted South Korea, the government decided to rebuild the country through culture instead of manufacturing — and by 2022 a nation of 51 million was earning $12 billion a year in music, film, television, and cosmetics
Mind & Meaning