Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Outer Planets
Uranus is tipped so far over it does not spin like other planets so much as roll around the Sun, and the result is brutal: each pole spends about 42 years in continuous sunlight, then roughly 42 years in unbroken darkness
Science
How does a planet 95 times the mass of Earth end up light enough to float on water?
Space Travel
The first woman to fly in space was not a test pilot or a scientist but a young textile worker, and in 1963 Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth alone for three days, longer than every American astronaut combined had managed by then
Science
The Parker Solar Probe flies through the sun's outer atmosphere behind a carbon shield eleven and a half centimetres thick, and the arrangement works so well that while the front face glows at almost fourteen hundred degrees, the instruments sitting a metre behind it stay at roughly the temperature of a comfortable living room
Earth News
The 24-hour day is not fixed but slowly stretching, and in the dinosaurs' time it was shorter: the Moon's pull is gently braking Earth's spin, so a day back then ran about 23.5 hours, and far shorter deeper in the past
Science
How does a lake the size of Lake Ontario stay liquid under four kilometres of Antarctic ice, sealed away from sunlight and the atmosphere for something like fifteen million years?
Psychology
For most of us the Hale-Bopp comet was a once-in-a-lifetime sight in the spring of 1997, but for thirty-nine people it was a departure time, and what happened next shocked the world.
Psychology
When researchers had a parent hold a blank, still face toward their baby, most infants unravelled within minutes — reaching, fussing, then giving up and turning away — and the protest ran hotter when the still face belonged to the mother than to a stranger
Science
We have more accurate maps of the surface of Mars and the Moon than of the floor of our own ocean — less than a third of the seabed has been measured in real detail, meaning most of the largest landscape on the planet has never been surveyed up close by a ship
Psychology
For decades, working out the shape of a single protein could cost a scientist years of painstaking lab work — then an AI called AlphaFold learned to do it in minutes and went on to map nearly every protein known to science, some 200 million of them, giving the whole library away for free
Climate Science
Several major cities are now close enough to running out of water that officials have started planning for the day the taps are switched off, and the list is getting longer every year
Science
On 1 September 1859 a solar storm hit Earth hard enough that auroras were seen over Cuba, and telegraph operators in Boston disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages for two hours on the current the sky was pushing through the wires.
Psychology
In 1848, a railway foreman named Phineas Gage was packing explosives into rock when a spark sent a three and a half foot iron rod straight up through his cheek and out the top of his skull, and the strangest part of the story is not that he survived, but what happened to him afterward
Science
Eighteen metres under a field in Romania sits a cave whose air no human can breathe for long — no light, a fraction of the oxygen up top, thick with the rotten-egg reek of hydrogen sulphide — and yet it holds dozens of pale, eyeless species that have fed on poison in total darkness for as long as five and a half million years
Human Behaviour