Science
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
A 'sasaeng' is the South Korean term for a fan whose devotion crosses into surveillance and intrusion, and the reframe that lingers is that the sasaeng isn't a malfunction of K-pop's intimacy model — they're its most literal customer
Science
Scientists expected the sun to enter a period of historic quiet after 2008, when solar activity hit its weakest level on record — instead it reversed course entirely and has been growing more active ever since, in a trend NASA published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in September 2025
Science
When Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up of Mars in 1965, the printer was too slow for the engineers waiting on it, so they pinned the raw numbers to a wall and coloured them in with pastels bought from an art shop down the road
Science
Two and a half kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, a cubic kilometre of frozen water has been wired with 5,160 light sensors, turning the South Pole itself into a telescope that looks down through the entire planet to catch particles arriving from the other side of the sky
Science
The second closest potentially habitable planet to Earth is not around a famous star; it is GJ 887 d, confirmed in 2026 around a quiet red dwarf 10.7 light-years away - making GJ 887 d the second-closest known habitable-zone planet after Proxima Centauri b
Science
A star near the centre of our galaxy reaches almost 3 per cent of the speed of light as it is whipped around something four million times the mass of the Sun that emits no light of its own — and tracking its orbit for nearly three decades helped two astronomers win a Nobel Prize
Aerospace
Spend a year in space and your own body will betray you on the way home, starting with your spine.
Science
How does the closest planet to the Sun, with a surface that hits 430 degrees at noon, hold on to billions of tonnes of ice that never melt?
Science
How does a pond in Antarctica sitting at minus 50 degrees refuse to freeze, year after year, while everything around it is solid ice?
Government
The Vatican is a fully sovereign state — with its own passports, postal service, tiny military guard and head of state — yet the whole country would fit comfortably inside a large city park
Psychology
A study showed six-month-old babies photos of spiders next to flowers matched for size and colour, and their pupils widened measurably for the spiders
Science
A deep-water shark's liver can account for up to 30 per cent of its total body mass, and the oil inside it is what corrects for having no swim bladder: the liver is, functionally, the shark's buoyancy organ
Science
A lion's tongue is covered in hollow, backward-pointing spines called papillae, widely credited with stripping flesh from bone and lifting hair from a hide: the same structure that makes a lick from a domestic cat feel like sandpaper
Culture
The Great Pyramid was raised from an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks in roughly 20 years — which works out to setting a block, some weighing several tonnes, about once every few minutes of daylight for two decades
Technology