Nuclear Space
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 293 articles · Back to full archive
Space Scopes
In October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived just 53 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 465°C heat and 92-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those 53 minutes it sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — grainy, black-and-white, and showing sharp-edged rocks nobody had expected to still be intact.
Africa News
The Great Green Wall was pitched in 2007 as an 8,000-kilometre tree barrier — but 15 years in, only about 4% of the trees are actually in the ground
Science
Physics says time travel into the future is not a thought experiment — every astronaut who has orbited Earth has returned a fraction of a second younger than they would have been if they had stayed on the ground
Science
In November 2025, UC Irvine astronomers announced a rocky super-Earth called GJ 251 c orbiting in a habitable zone less than 20 light-years away — close enough that the next generation of ground-based telescopes may actually photograph it directly
Science
Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, but not for relativity. The Nobel Committee avoided honouring that still-controversial theory directly, and instead awarded him for his work on the photoelectric effect — the discovery that helped launch quantum physics.
Science
The International Space Station is not held up by rockets. It is falling constantly, in a precise arc that matches the curvature of Earth — a controlled fall that has continued without interruption since November 2000
Science
In nearly seventy years of deep-sea exploration, researchers compiled 43,681 submersible dive records — and found that humans have visually observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, according to a Science Advances study published in May 2025.
Science
We have mapped the surface of Mars, the Moon and Venus in sharper detail than the floor of our own ocean, most of which no human instrument has ever seen up close
Science
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old Kansas farm boy with no formal astronomy degree, who had taught himself the sky and built his own telescopes by grinding mirrors from salvaged parts — before Lowell Observatory hired him as a young assistant to search for Planet X.
Science
A neutron star can pack more mass than our entire Sun into a sphere only about 20 kilometres across — roughly the size of a city — and a teaspoon of its material would weigh about a billion tonnes on Earth, more than every human being alive combined.
Space Travel
About 50 kilometres above Venus’ surface, the crushing heat and pressure below give way to temperatures and air pressure surprisingly close to Earth’s, a region NASA has described as the most Earth-surface-like environment in the solar system — at least by those measures, more forgiving than the surface of Mars.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day by Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius "I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
Science
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, yet it remains inside the gravitational reach of our Sun — true departure from the solar system, via the Oort Cloud, won't happen for 30,000 years
Science
Proxima Centauri b is our closest known habitable-zone exoplanet, just over four light-years away, and it may be warm enough for liquid water if it has kept an atmosphere. But that “if” is enormous: its red-dwarf star blasts it with extreme radiation strong enough, in some models, to strip an Earth-like atmosphere away.
Mind & Meaning