Flora And Fauna
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 557 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Thought of the day from philosopher Charles-Louis de Montesquieu: "If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
Flora And Fauna
Researchers in Japan documented carrion crows placing walnuts in front of cars stopped at traffic lights, then letting the vehicles crack the shells before retrieving the food — behaviour recorded repeatedly over 21 months.
Science
Trees are connected by fungal threads beneath the soil, trading carbon and chemical signals in ways scientists are still arguing over — including whether a dying tree can pass part of itself into the forest before it goes
Human Behaviour
Women born in Spain in 1896 were estimated to average about 151.1 centimetres tall. Those born in 1996 averaged about 163.4 centimetres — a gain of 12.3 centimetres across a century of birth cohorts.
Science
A black fungus that thrives in damp bathrooms and has been found aboard the ISS was the toughest organism in NASA's new Moon-survival study — even outperforming a bacterium famous for being one of the most radiation-resistant lifeforms on Earth.
Venusian Heat
Rocket Lab and MIT are preparing a privately funded probe to plunge through Venus's clouds looking for organic chemistry linked to possible life. It will get only about five minutes to take measurements before descending into increasingly lethal conditions — and the entire mission has been estimated at under $10 million.
Human Behaviour
In Rajasthan's Karni Mata temple, rats are not treated as pests but as sacred beings — as many as 25,000 of them move freely through the shrine, fed milk, sweets, and grain by pilgrims who believe they are reincarnated family
Science
In 1997, scientists sent cameras down with sperm whales to find the monster hidden in their scars: the giant squid. The footage they wanted never came, but the failed hunt helped point science toward one of the deep ocean’s most elusive animals
Human Behaviour
Roughly one human language disappears every few weeks, and each one takes with it words for places, plants, feelings, jokes, and ways of seeing the world that no other language may ever name the same way
Science
NASA is set to launch a telescope on August 30 that could detect around 100,000 new worlds — more than all previous planet-hunting observatories have found combined — using a camera that captures 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot.
Science
Three black holes appear to be feeding inside a single galaxy seen 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, and the two nearest its centre are close enough to spiral together within roughly 700 million years — though the paper reporting them calls it evidence, not a confirmed triplet
Science
A comet that drifted between the stars for millions or even billions of years before entering our Solar System carries water with roughly 30 times more heavy hydrogen than a typical comet here, suggesting its ice formed in an extraordinarily cold alien planetary system.
Deep Impact
An asteroid spent roughly 60 years quietly shadowing Earth's journey around the Sun before astronomers noticed it in 2025. Orbital calculations show 2025 PN7 has been locked in step with our planet since the 1960s, while archival images reveal that telescopes had photographed the faint object years before anyone realised what it was.
Moon Daily
In January 1946, eleven years before Sputnik, a US Army radio crew in New Jersey bounced a signal off the Moon and heard it come back 2.5 seconds later, and that echo was the first time anything humans made had touched another world
Materials