Solar Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 573 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
Dogs assess more than a person’s posture, voice, or facial expression when they meet them; researchers who study canine olfaction have found that dogs can detect the chemical signature of psychological stress in human breath and sweat, meaning they may know your body is under pressure before you say a word
Science
The axolotl can regrow a lost leg, a piece of its heart, parts of its spinal cord, and even sections of its brain with no scarring, and yet in the wild it survives in a single network of canals on the outskirts of Mexico City, where fewer than 1,000 individuals are thought to remain
Science
The blue whale's heart weighs about 400 pounds, beats as slowly as twice per minute when the animal is deep-diving, and pushes blood through an aorta about nine inches across, wide enough to fit a human head but not the crawling child of the popular legend
Human Behaviour
Quote by Viktor Frankl: When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves
Science
We tend to picture glaciers as slow rivers of white ice, but the Blood Falls that leak from Antarctica's Taylor Glacier run a deep rust red, fed by a briny lake sealed under the ice for roughly 1.5 million years that hosts microbes living without sunlight or oxygen
Science
In the Atacama Desert of Chile, there are weather stations that have never recorded a single drop of rain in more than a century of operation, and yet a fog rolling in from the Pacific twice a week feeds lichens, cacti, and a fishing village that has drunk nothing else for 300 years
Science
A cotton T-shirt takes roughly 2,700 litres of water to produce, about what one person drinks in two and a half years, and most of that water is pulled from irrigation-stressed river basins in Central and South Asia thousands of kilometres from where the shirt is eventually sold
Climate Science
We tend to picture glaciers as slow rivers of frozen water, but the Byrd Glacier in Antarctica drains an area larger than California through a gap in the Transantarctic Mountains at up to 800 metres a year, dragging enough ice to raise global sea level measurably if it ever fully released
Science
The Soviet Venera 13 lander parachuted through the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus in March 1982 and touched down in a landscape hot enough to melt lead, transmitted the first colour photographs of the surface for 127 minutes before the pressure crushed it, and along the way recorded the wind — the only audio anyone has ever captured from another planet's surface
Science
Bristlecone pines growing in the White Mountains of California include one individual that germinated around 3050 BCE, meaning it was already 500 years old when the first stones of the Great Pyramid at Giza were cut, and it is still putting out needles this year
Constellations
In May 1961, Alan Shepard's Mercury flight was delayed so many hours on the pad that he eventually radioed mission control to say he had to urinate inside his suit, and engineers, having designed no plumbing for a 15-minute flight, told him to go ahead and short out the medical sensors taped to his chest
Science
Off the coast of Japan, a jellyfish smaller than a fingernail called Turritopsis dohrnii responds to injury or starvation by collapsing back into a blob on the seafloor and regrowing into a juvenile polyp, effectively resetting its life cycle with no known upper limit on how many times it can do it
Tectonics
The Peruvian Amazon holds a river that runs hot enough to boil small animals that fall in, reaching 86 degrees Celsius along a 6-kilometre stretch with no volcano anywhere nearby, and geologists think it is heated by water circulating several kilometres deep through faults in the rock
Moon Daily
A SpaceX rocket stage launched in January 2025 drifted for more than 18 months before crashing into the Moon at 8,700 km/h, carving a crater tens of metres wide — while newer lunar launches are sending spent stages safely onward into orbit around the Sun instead.
Rocket Science