Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 645 articles · Back to full archive
Science
The Soviet Buran shuttle flew exactly once, in November 1988, completing two unmanned orbits and landing itself in a crosswind on a Kazakh runway with such precision that engineers found it stopped within 3 metres of the centreline — and then the program was cancelled and the orbiter was crushed 14 years later when its hangar roof collapsed.
Human Behaviour
Psychology suggests people who suddenly downsize their lives in their 60s — smaller house, fewer clothes, shorter guest lists — aren't giving up, they're finally noticing what was costing them without earning its keep
Science
About 46,000 objects are now tracked around Earth, and roughly 30,000 are not functioning satellites — one collision can turn two of them into thousands, making orbital debris a risk that manufactures more of itself
Mind & Meaning
A man once claimed he lived an entire life inside his mind — falling in love, getting married, raising two children — until one day he noticed a lamp in his living room looked strangely wrong, and the world around him began to collapse.
Science
Uranus rotates almost completely on its side, tipped by 97.77 degrees, most likely by a giant impact billions of years ago — but its tilted moons keep the case from being closed
Aerospace
NASA's whole 2026 budget was 24 billion dollars, a new poverty-economics study puts the real price of ending extreme poverty at up to 318 billion dollars a year, and the math behind 'fund poverty instead of space' turns out to run the wrong direction
Outer Planets
Voyager 2 may have caught Uranus on a freak day — a 2024 reanalysis suggests the 1986 flyby that shaped four decades of understanding arrived during a compressed state estimated to occur only about 4% of the time
Science
For roughly a billion years of Earth’s deep past, the Moon’s ocean tides may have slowed the planet while a Sun-driven atmospheric tide sped it up, holding the day near 19 hours — but the rocks preserve a hypothesis, not a stopwatch
Psychology
The most extensive review of dementia risk to date found nearly half of all cases trace back to 14 everyday factors, from hearing loss to untreated vision problems, most of which have more to do with your health than your age
Science
NASA has contracted a purpose-built spacecraft to push the International Space Station out of orbit in late 2030, steering the 430-tonne structure towards the remote South Pacific near Point Nemo, where passing astronauts can briefly be the nearest humans
Mind & Meaning
We often call it a "gut feeling," but intuition may begin in the brain and body working together — combining memories, emotions, physical signals, and tiny details we barely notice.
Earth News
Finland is still rising out of the sea after the last ice age, so new land keeps appearing along its coast — but under Finnish law it does not automatically belong to whoever owns the shore in front of it
Science
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015 and kept going, and in January 2019 it photographed a small icy world called Arrokoth four billion miles from the Sun, the most distant object ever visited, shaped like two snowballs gently stuck together since the solar system’s birth
Water World
For centuries the Dutch took land from the water, but between 2006 and 2019 they spent €2.3 billion deliberately giving rivers more room
Ice World