Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Mercury turns exactly three times on its axis for every two orbits of the Sun, so a single day there lasts two of its years, and from the right spot on the surface you would watch the Sun rise, stop, reverse, and rise a second time.
Science
Almost every sensitive radiation detector built since 1945 relies on steel salvaged from ships that sank before the first nuclear test, because everything smelted after that date carries a faint trace of the bomb era in its structure, and the supply of pre-war wrecks is finite.
Flora And Fauna
By the 1950s war had stripped South Korea's hills bare, and few believed the forests would return: yet a decades-long national planting campaign brought them back, and today woodland covers roughly two-thirds of the whole country once again
Science
The Mediterranean dried out almost completely about 5.6 million years ago and sat as a salt desert for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Atlantic broke back through at Gibraltar and refilled the entire basin in a flood that may have taken as little as two years
Psychology
Standing under a huge night sky does something measurable to us, beyond a simple sense of wonder: studies find that awe shrinks the sense of self and leaves people noticeably more generous, patient and willing to help others
Science
Cassini was deliberately flown into Saturn in September 2017 while still working perfectly, because the alternative was letting a dying spacecraft carrying Earth bacteria eventually drift into Enceladus, a moon with a liquid ocean and hydrothermal vents on its floor.
Human Behaviour
Before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, he made one unusual demand: that a mathematician named Katherine Johnson check the computer's numbers by hand, saying that if she agreed they were right, he was ready to fly
Science
Every atom of oxygen in the air traces back to a catastrophe: cyanobacteria started releasing it about 2.4 billion years ago, poisoned most of the life that existed at the time, and stripped enough methane from the atmosphere to freeze the planet nearly to the equator.
Science
Many scientists have won a Nobel Prize, but only one person ever pulled off what Marie Curie did: she won Nobels in two different sciences, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, a feat no one has repeated in the century since
Science
The Sahara sends roughly 27 million tonnes of dust across the Atlantic every year, and the phosphorus in it is what stops the Amazon's soils exhausting themselves, which means the largest rainforest on earth is quietly fertilised by the largest hot desert on earth.
Psychology
In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones.
Energy Daily
The electricity the world's data centres swallow may roughly double by 2030, to a level so vast it rivals a whole industrial nation: they may draw about 945 terawatt-hours a year, close to all of Japan's power use today
Mind & Meaning
At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand metres down, lies a lake so lethal its discoverers named it the Jacuzzi of Despair — a pool of brine so dense it will not mix with the sea around it, its floor lined with the pickled remains of nearly everything that swims into it.
Human Behaviour
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
Deep Space