Aerospace
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Flora And Fauna
Because it chases summer from one end of the planet to the other, the Arctic tern experiences two summers every year and very likely sees more daylight than any other creature alive
Human Behaviour
Demographers estimate that about 117 billion members of our species have ever been born, which means the roughly 8 billion of us alive today are about 7% of everyone who has ever lived
Political Economy
At independence in 1966, Botswana had about 12 km of paved road and only a few dozen university graduates; within six decades it became an upper-middle-income country with one of the highest GDP per head in Africa and one of the continent's cleanest corruption records
Constellations
A galaxy confirmed this January formed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, and the part astronomers cannot explain is that it is far too large, far too soon, as if the early universe was building things it was not supposed to be able to build yet.
Mind & Meaning
We tend to think real connection value only comes from close friends and family, but researchers found that brief, ordinary exchanges with near-strangers — the barista, the person on the train — measurably raise happiness and a sense of belonging
Constellations
On April 1 this year, four astronauts left Earth on humanity’s first crewed lunar mission since 1972, and by April 6 they had flown farther from home than any humans in history — returning with the strange perspective astronauts have described for decades, where Earth stops looking like a place and starts looking like something impossibly fragile.
Moon Daily
NASA awards nearly $600 million for four new Moon Base cargo landings, targeting late 2028
Science
Deep in the Mexican jungle this June, archaeologists reached an intact Maya city hidden for more than a thousand years, where a pyramid temple, carved monuments and silent plazas had survived beneath the forest because there was literally “no road” to get there.
Science
In December 2020, Singapore became the first country in human history to approve the commercial sale of meat that had never been part of a slaughtered animal — chicken grown from cultured cells in a bioreactor by a San Francisco company, served initially in a single Singapore restaurant
Technology
When OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview on November 30, 2022, the software reached 100 million users worldwide in just 60 days — making it the fastest consumer application in the history of the internet, a milestone that had taken TikTok 9 months and Instagram over 2 years
Mind & Meaning
The first McDonald's ever to open in the Soviet Union welcomed 38,000 Russians on January 31, 1990 — a queue that snaked for kilometres through the freezing centre of Moscow and lasted up to 6 hours, 22 months before the country itself would cease to exist
Mind & Meaning
Before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, Italian cooking had no tomatoes, Irish cooking had no potatoes, Swiss chocolate did not exist, and Thai cuisine had no chili peppers — each of those ingredients grew on a continent the other half of humanity had not yet found
Human Behaviour
Quote by Walter Cronkite: “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
Marsdaily
NASA’s Curiosity rover has identified the most diverse set of organic molecules yet found on Mars, including seven never before detected there, from a sample drilled in 2020 and studied for years before the chemistry finally came into focus
Psychology