Psychology
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 570 articles · Back to full archive
Aerospace
Every asteroid with a 'neck' that astronomers had ever found had exactly two lobes joined at one narrow waist — until new images of the asteroid Nysa this month revealed a third lobe nobody expected, and nobody yet knows whether it was born whole or built from three separate collisions
Science
Japan is sending a spacecraft to land on Phobos, where gravity is about 1,700 times weaker than Earth’s. MMX will collect more than 10 grams of material and return it to Australia in 2031 — the first sample ever deliberately brought back to Earth from the Martian system.
Science
On 13 April 2029, a roughly 375-metre asteroid named Apophis will pass closer to Earth than some of our own satellites — just 32,000 kilometres above the surface — and new calculations suggest up to 90% of humanity could potentially see it cross the sky with the naked eye.
Science
Sea otters have the densest fur of any mammal on Earth, up to one million hairs per square inch, because unlike whales and seals they carry no insulating blubber and would freeze to death in the North Pacific without a coat that traps a layer of air against their skin
Science
A radar aboard ESA’s Mars Express detected an extraordinarily bright reflection beneath 1.5 kilometres of Martian polar ice, spread across a patch roughly 20 kilometres wide. Years later, a second radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally reached the same layer — and saw only a faint echo, deepening a debate over whether there is liquid water, unusual rock, or something else beneath Mars’s south pole.
Science
Vampire bats will regurgitate blood to save a starving roost-mate, even one they are not related to — then remember who helped them before, in a system of animal reciprocity that looks less like instinct than a tiny favour economy
White Out
We tend to think of Antarctica as the coldest place on Earth, but the actual record was set on the East Antarctic Plateau where satellites measured a surface temperature of minus 98 degrees Celsius, cold enough that breathing it unprotected would injure the airway long before the air reached the lungs
Science
NASA’s Viking 2 lander photographed frost forming on Mars in the 1970s. Nearly half a century later, a University of Arkansas researcher fed its old weather measurements into a model and found something Viking’s scientists never knew: for roughly 30 Martian days each year, the frost around the lander may have created tiny pools of liquid perchlorate brine.
Human Behaviour
Some of the loneliest people in their sixties aren't the ones without visitors, they're the ones whose family only asks how they are inside the same three-minute call before hanging up
Time And Space
Georgios Kritikos died of decompression sickness during the ten-month salvage of the Antikythera wreck and two of his crewmates were left paralysed, and the site they were dragged off has spent the century since giving up marble heads, human teeth and a skeleton to divers who keep going back
Science
Spotted hyenas evolved unusually large frontal brain regions and social skills that rival those of monkeys — even though their lineages split tens of millions of years ago. Researchers see it as convergent evolution: intelligence finding a similar solution twice.
Exo Worlds
A rocky planet called TOI-561 b completes an entire year in under 11 hours and orbits so close to its star that its surface is thought to contain a vast magma ocean. Its star is roughly 10 billion years old — twice the age of the Sun — yet after billions of years of extreme radiation, James Webb found compelling evidence that the planet still has a thick atmosphere.
Science
Some of the most promising places to search for alien life aren't planets at all, but moons — because Europa and Enceladus keep oceans liquid beneath their ice partly through the gravitational squeezing of giant planets, an internal heat source that doesn't care how far they are from the Sun.
Space Travel
Apollo 14 carried roughly 500 tree seeds around the Moon in 1971, they were germinated and planted in schoolyards and state capitols across America, and then nobody kept a proper list — until a NASA scientist started hunting the survivors and has now tracked down dozens still growing.
Tech Space