Human Behaviour
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 633 articles · Back to full archive
Asia News
Despite topping the OECD for tertiary-educated 25 to 34 year olds, South Korea also has a third of its working-age adults scoring at the lowest levels of literacy — and the gap reflects both generations and ageing
Constellations
In the weeks before Apollo 11 launched, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins spent their quarantine signing hundreds of autographs, not for fans, but so their families could sell them if the mission killed them, since no insurer would cover astronauts at all
Mind & Meaning
In 1952, a British gem dealer in Myanmar bought a deep red crystal believing he'd found a ruby — he had actually stumbled onto a mineral so rare that for the next fifty years, only a handful more were ever found anywhere on the planet
Mind & Meaning
A neuroscientist built a tiny car out of a plastic food container, taught rats to drive it in exchange for Froot Loops, and discovered something no one expected — the rats seemed to genuinely love driving, jumping into the car and revving the lever before they'd even set off
Psychology
Studies on chronic nail biters keep pointing to the same unexpected personality trait, and it isn't anxiousness. It's perfectionism, a low tolerance for sitting still with something unfinished or imperfect
Mind & Meaning
What the Soviet Union feared most about losing a single chess match in 1972 wasn't the trophy — it was the argument the loss would hand to every capitalist government watching, that the system built to prove Soviet minds were superior could still be beaten by one man with barely any institution behind him
Moon Daily
The tides are slowly stealing rotational energy from Earth and giving it to the Moon, lengthening our days while pushing the Moon about 3.8 centimetres farther away each year — a transaction scientists can measure with lasers left by Apollo astronauts.
Mind & Meaning
In Botswana, conservation biologists spent years painting enormous fake eyes onto the backsides of over two thousand cattle, betting on a simple piece of predator psychology — that a lion who thinks it's been spotted usually abandons the hunt
Psychology
In the late 1960s, a psychologist put twelve-month-old babies through a simple test — leave the room, come back, watch what happens — and the way each child reacted in those few seconds turned out to predict something about how they'd love people well into adulthood
Mind & Meaning
After returning from orbit, astronauts sometimes release objects as if they will float; their brains have not forgotten gravity, but their movements need time to predict it again
Mind & Meaning
At Midway in 1942, an American fleet that was significantly outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese navy won anyway, because codebreakers had pieced together enough of Japan's plans before the battle even began. Intelligence, not firepower, decided one of the most consequential naval battles in the Pacific War
Tech Space
SpaceX has asked to operate up to one million AI satellites, but their direct waste heat would barely affect global temperature; the larger climate question is what launches and mass re-entry would put into the upper atmosphere
Technology
The Bluetooth symbol on your phone is actually a thousand-year-old Viking monogram. It belongs to a Danish king who united warring tribes, and the reason his name ended up on billions of devices was never even meant to be permanent.
Science
The claim that a third of humanity cannot see the Milky Way comes from a 2016 atlas, and newer studies show why producing an updated global headcount is harder than it sounds
Science