Tech Space
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 571 articles · Back to full archive
Technology
Turning on airplane mode was never really about keeping the plane in the air, a phone has almost no chance of downing an aircraft, and the rule exists largely because a cabin full of phones frantically pinging towers annoys ground networks and, at worst, buzzes in the pilots' headsets
Culture
Under everyman's right, anyone in Finland can walk, ski, cycle, ride, swim, angle and camp temporarily — even across privately owned countryside — provided they leave the place undisturbed
Tech Space
Sending a kilogram to orbit cost roughly $55,000 in the Space Shuttle era. Reusable rockets have brought the theoretical cost down to a few thousand dollars today. If Starship eventually achieves rapid full reusability, some projections put the figure below $100/kg — potentially turning access to orbit from an extraordinary expense into something approaching ordinary transportation.
Culture
Venice is standing on millions of tree trunks hammered upright into the lagoon mud a thousand years ago, and they never rotted — buried in oxygen-starved silt, the wood slowly turned to something closer to stone, which is why the city is still there.
Science
Solar power disappears every night, but a data centre cannot. That engineering mismatch is turning Google, Amazon and other technology giants into some of the world's most important buyers of battery storage, financing gigawatt-scale systems to keep increasingly power-hungry AI infrastructure supplied around the clock.
Russian Space
Before he was a cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev flew aerobatics for the Soviet national team, and in 1986 — the same year he finished cosmonaut training — he was champion of the USSR
Science
When the young Earth was a molten inferno, much of its water may not have escaped to space at all. A 2025 Science study found that as the planet cooled, the mineral bridgmanite could have locked as much as an ocean's worth of water deep inside the mantle — and some of that primordial reservoir may still survive there today.
Science
Around eight per cent of your DNA was left behind by ancient viruses, and one of those stolen viral genes is what builds the placenta — meaning every mammal alive, including you, was born because a virus infected an ancestor and never left.
Marsdaily
On 2 July 2026, NASA's Perseverance rover captured Earth disappearing behind Phobos from the surface of Mars — the first time in history a camera on another planet has watched our world vanish behind another object.
Water World
The water in your cup of coffee is about 125 millilitres, but the water behind it is closer to 140 litres — nearly all of it associated with growing the beans long before anyone boiled a kettle
Outer Planets
JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's tiny inner moons and its rings that probably formed deep inside much larger icy worlds — compelling evidence that today's moons may be rubble from Neptune's original satellite system, destroyed when the captured moon Triton tore through it billions of years ago.
Tech Space
AI data centres are being criticised for the water they use, but one kilogram of beef can require roughly 15,000 litres to produce — a staggering reminder that some of the biggest environmental costs are still sitting on our plates
Time And Space
JWST spotted an object 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks like a star the size of our solar system but shines 100 billion times brighter than any star — and the only thing that could explain it is a black hole wrapped inside
Science
RNA is supposed to fall apart within hours, yet researchers have now read it from a mammoth frozen in Siberian permafrost 39,000 years ago — and the transcripts caught his muscle tissue in the middle of a stress response
Science