Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 572 articles · Back to full archive
Science
James Webb spotted a bizarre object just 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks like an enormous star but shines with roughly 100 billion Suns' worth of energy — because hidden inside its star-like cocoon is an accreting black hole, rather than a core powered by nuclear fusion.
Science
A trail camera in British Columbia recorded a wild wolf swimming out to a buoy and hauling a fully submerged crab trap up the beach by its rope, then working the bait cup open — three minutes of footage no wild canid had ever been filmed doing
Space Travel
A 58-kilometre-long spacecraft called Chrysalis won an international design competition in 2025 by laying out in extraordinary detail how 2,400 people could live, reproduce and govern themselves on a 400-year voyage — long enough for generations to be born, grow old and die without ever seeing Earth or the world their descendants were travelling toward.
Science
A bowhead whale living today could have been born before the American Civil War. Scientists estimate the species can live more than 200 years, while 19th-century harpoon fragments found embedded in harvested whales provide extraordinary physical evidence of their longevity — making bowheads the longest-lived mammals known.
Science
Dolphins on opposite sides of Australia, thousands of kilometres apart, appear to have independently learned to chase fish into empty seashells and tip the trapped meal into their mouths — two populations, one remarkably similar invention.
Science
A typical AI-focused data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes. Now companies want to put them in orbit, where carefully chosen satellites can see almost continuous sunlight and dump their waste heat into space through giant radiators instead of conventional cooling plants.
Marsdaily
Earth has a blue sky and red sunsets; Mars has a red sky and blue sunsets — and the reason for both is exactly the same mechanism, running in reverse because the dust is a different size
Constellations
At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.
Saturn Daily
Mimas looks like one of Saturn's deadest moons: a frozen, heavily cratered ball with no obvious activity. Then scientists discovered a global ocean beneath it in 2024 — an ocean less than 25 million years old, younger than the Himalayas, hiding beneath a surface that gives almost nothing away.
Moon Daily
Scientists led by UCLA found that permanently shaded parts of pits on the Moon stay near a constant 17°C while the exposed surface swings between 127°C and −173°C — meaning humanity's first permanent lunar address may be underground.
Venusian Heat
On 1 March 1982, a Soviet probe called Venera 13 touched down on Venus and was expected to last just 32 minutes in 465°C heat — it survived for 127 minutes, drilled and analysed a soil sample, and sent back the first colour photographs ever taken from the surface of Venus.
Saturn Daily
Scientists recreated the conditions on Saturn's moon Titan and watched molecules that shouldn't mix form stable crystals together — at around minus 179°C, polar hydrogen cyanide accepts nonpolar methane and ethane into its crystal structure, breaking one of chemistry's most familiar rules of thumb.
Science
Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.
Space Travel
Voyager 2 is nearly 50 years old, losing about 4 watts of power every year as its plutonium power source fades — and NASA just bought it at least another year of science with an all-at-once power-system swap engineers called the “Big Bang,” performed on a spacecraft with razor-thin power margins and no possibility of physical repair.
Solar Science