Black Holes
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 280 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Despite Costa Rica having wider income inequality than the United States on the standard measure, its least advantaged citizens outlive Americans in the same position — which is the part researchers cannot fully explain
Science
Everything you have ever touched — every mountain, ocean, star, and galaxy visible through any telescope — is made of the 5% of the universe that physicists can actually account for. The other 95% has no name beyond 'dark', and no confirmed identity at all.
Science
There is a spot in the South Pacific Ocean, 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land in every direction, where more than 263 decommissioned spacecraft lie on the ocean floor — and the closest humans to it are usually astronauts passing 400 kilometres overhead
Psychology
A growing population of women over 40 are choosing to stay single, and many are not treating it as a temporary gap between relationships — surveys find older single women are far less likely than men their age to be looking for a partner at all
Space Scopes
Neptune's largest moon Triton travels around its planet backwards, orbiting in the opposite direction to Neptune's rotation — strong evidence that this frozen world probably formed somewhere else before Neptune captured it.
Psychology
A man in a Batman costume stood silently on a Milan train, a few metres from a woman who appeared pregnant, and never once interacted with her or anyone else — yet his presence alone was followed by a jump in the share of passengers who offered her a seat from roughly one in three to two in three
Outer Planets
Titan is the only world besides Earth with an active liquid cycle: clouds form, rain falls, rivers carve channels and seas fill and evaporate — but the rain is liquid methane and the ground beneath it is water ice frozen hard as stone.
Asia News
South Korea's full-time gender wage gap was 29.3 per cent in 2023, but a new study puts the conditional gap among recent college graduates at around four per cent.
Aerospace
In January 1961, a chimpanzee named Ham was strapped into a Mercury capsule and launched on a suborbital arc that overshot its target by roughly 240 kilometres, and when the hatch was opened aboard the USS Donner, he was found alive, slightly dehydrated, somewhat exhausted, and carrying a small abrasion across his nose
Human Behaviour
Wellness retreats are sold as a break from your life. What a 2025 neuroimaging study found is that after seven days, the brain network responsible for that constant inner narrator went about as quiet as it typically does on psilocybin, and nobody in the study had taken anything
Psychology
Hundreds of people wrote to a Bristol newspaper in the 1970s about a hum they could feel more than hear — a warehouse fan was blamed, the warehouse closed, the reports continued, and fifty years later the same complaint has been filed across continents by people who have never met
Culture
Most people assume the Dutch have always cycled, but in the 1960s the Netherlands was rebuilding its cities for cars — in 1972, 3,264 people died on its roads
Deep Space
For 72 seconds in August 1977, an Ohio radio telescope picked up a signal thirty times stronger than the background hum of space, sitting almost exactly on the frequency scientists had guessed an alien civilization would choose — and it has never been heard again
Solar Science
NASA’s ensemble forecast named the minute an August solar eruption would reach Earth, but its 22-hour uncertainty window shows why one perfect hit does not solve space weather
Marsdaily