Venusian Heat
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 642 articles · Back to full archive
Deep Impact
The asteroid that ended the dinosaur age struck Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula about 66 million years ago, and the sulphur-rich rocks beneath it helped turn a roughly 10-kilometre object into a global climate disaster
Science
There's a parasite in the ocean that doesn't just feed on its host, it becomes part of it — Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills, kills off its tongue by cutting the blood supply, and then attaches itself to the stump, living the rest of its life as the fish's new, functioning tongue
Solar Science
A grain of stardust extracted from the Murchison meteorite that landed in Victoria in 1969 was dated to roughly 7 billion years old, meaning it condensed in the atmosphere of a dying star more than 2 billion years before the Sun existed
Tech Space
At 224 kilometres above Earth, ESA's GOCE could have as little as two days to recover from a propulsion interruption: very low Earth orbit sharpens satellite images, but the atmosphere never stops pulling the spacecraft down
Science
There's a bird in Uganda's swamps so strange-looking that tourists who finally spot one don't just call it rare, they call it prehistoric — a four-foot-tall creature with a hooked, razor-edged bill that looks like it wandered out of the age of dinosaurs
Outer Planets
A real group of scientists and engineers spent two days in Boulder this June asking what it would actually take to send humans to Titan, and their honest answer was that it isn't a question of physics, it's a question of time, technology and commitment
Mind & Meaning
The most secretive facility of the Cold War is named after a town it isn't actually in: the Soviets called it Baikonur specifically to mislead the West, while the true launch site sat two hundred miles away, hidden on the Kazakh steppe
Science
In June 1961, a UCLA graduate student's summer job at JPL was to solve a narrower trajectory problem, but on his own time he worked out gravity assist, the technique that now lets spacecraft borrow speed from a planet without burning any fuel at all
Launch Pad
NASA's first Space Shuttle launch lost 16 heat shield tiles and damaged 148 more before it even left the ground, not from any failure, but from the shock wave of its own engines bouncing back off the launch pad
Science
AI actually flying on spacecraft today is a narrow fix for one physical problem, not machine judgment: a Mars rover picks its own laser targets with 93 percent accuracy, and one satellite's entire first AI experiment was built by a single engineer in under two weeks
Marsdaily
Mars is no longer one grand mission: Perseverance has driven a marathon, sample return is still being redesigned, and NASA's Aeolus partnership shows how much Martian weather we still need to learn
Science
A child who can see 250 stars today may see fewer than 100 from the same place at eighteen: 51,351 naked-eye observations found the night sky brightening far faster than satellites had measured
Science
The Mission Robotic Vehicle launched on July 21 with two seven-jointed arms meant to inspect, relocate and upgrade ageing satellites; after a year-long trip, it is meant to test whether spacecraft can become serviceable infrastructure
Outer Planets
Titan is never the same distance from Earth twice: the gap can run from about 1.2 billion kilometres to nearly 1.65 billion depending on where both worlds sit in their orbits, stretching a signal's one-way trip from just over an hour to past ninety minutes
Science