Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 643 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Saudi Arabia sits on the world's largest sand desert and yet imports construction sand from Australia, because the wind-rounded grains of the Empty Quarter are too smooth to bind in concrete and modern construction needs the jagged sand pulled from riverbeds and quarries
Deep Space
Voyager 1 is down to two working science instruments, and the fix that just bought its twin, Voyager 2, another year of power is now being tested on a probe NASA says no longer behaves quite like its sibling
Solar Science
In 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at a solar eclipse in India and saw a yellow line that matched no known element on Earth, and the gas he identified in the Sun's chromosphere — named helium, after helios — would not be found on this planet for another 27 years, when a Scottish chemist finally coaxed it from a lump of uranium ore
Human Behaviour
Some of the loneliest people in their fifties aren't the ones without partners or children, they're the ones surrounded by people who only know the version of them that shows up when everyone else needs something
Human Behaviour
Quote by Carl Jung: The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely
Science
The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre per year and does not reach sexual maturity until roughly age 150, meaning the pups being born in the North Atlantic this year will not breed until the 22nd century
Science
In 1994, a bushwalker rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a stand of trees with waxy bubbled bark that matched fossils 90 million years old, and the Wollemi pine turned out to be a species everyone had assumed died with the dinosaurs
Africa News
More than three decades after the genocide, Rwanda has the highest share of women in a lower or single chamber of parliament of any country, and it is not close — 51 of 80 seats, 63.75%, against a global average of about 27%. The constitutional floor is 30%; women hold nearly half of the directly elected seats too
Science
In 1977, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sat in a Cornell office arguing over what to put on the Voyager Golden Record, and among the greetings in 55 languages, the whale song, and the Bach they included the sound of a young woman's brainwaves recorded while she thought about being in love.
Human Behaviour
10 small phrases parents use when they've given up trying to be understood by their adult children
Earth Observation
On August 12, for the first time in 28 months, the Moon's shadow will sweep across Earth in a total solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain — and just hours later, the Perseid meteor shower will peak under a moonless sky, setting up one of the most extraordinary nights of sky-watching in years
The Stans
In the mountains of Kazakhstan lies a forest frozen beneath a turquoise lake — drowned more than a century ago when an earthquake reshaped the valley, leaving hundreds of ghostly tree trunks still standing upright in the water.
Mind & Meaning
Archaeologists examining a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy found something no one had ever seen before: a page of Homer's Iliad, used as embalming material — meaning one of the most famous poems in human history spent sixteen centuries wrapped around a body, doing a job no librarian could have imagined
Science
Every commercial jet flying today gets struck by lightning roughly once a year — a 200,000-ampere bolt courses through the fuselage and exits via the tail, and most passengers land at their destination never knowing it happened
Science