Culture
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 655 articles · Back to full archive
Venusian Heat
Scientists reanalysed 1978 Pioneer Venus data and found the planet's clouds are roughly 60% water, not the concentrated sulfuric acid assumed for decades — a finding that quietly reopens the question of whether something could live up there
Science
Around 1,200 people quietly moved back into the Chernobyl exclusion zone after the evacuation and were mostly left alone. Most were elderly, many were women, and only a small remnant remains; the population has dwindled largely because it was old and never renewed
Saturn Daily
Saturn now has at least 285 confirmed moons — after astronomers recognised 128 new ones in a single announcement in March 2025 and another 11 in March 2026 — making every textbook printed before 2024 quietly wrong on the subject
Marsdaily
The programme to return Perseverance's rock samples from Mars was cancelled by the US Congress in January 2026 — the rover has spent five years drilling and caching the most carefully selected geological samples in history, and right now there is no approved mission to bring them home
Space Travel
The nearest star system sits 4.2 light-years away—a distance today’s spacecraft would need tens of thousands of years to cross, yet a proposed laser-driven sail carrying a gram-scale probe could make the journey in just over 20.
Outer Planets
A giant planet was hiding in plain sight in one of astronomy's most-studied star systems
Science
Earth's core holds enough gold to cover every continent in a layer 50 centimetres deep, but until volcanic rocks from Hawaii were analysed in 2025, geologists assumed it was sealed away forever — the core turns out to be leaking
Science
A Y-chromosome analysis of a 4,000-year-old Siberian warrior buried beneath more than 100 bone armor plates has traced his lineage to peoples still living across the Russian Far East today
Deep Impact
The asteroid belt looks dense in every diagram ever printed in a textbook, but every spacecraft sent through it since 1972 has crossed without hitting a single asteroid — because the real belt is 99.9% empty space, spread across a region larger than Earth's entire orbit
Science
The Moon does not cross the sky at a steady speed, and the Antikythera mechanism accounted for it with two slightly offset gears joined by a pin running in a slot. It is the oldest surviving geared device known to produce a quasi-sinusoidal variation, centuries before the first surviving sine tables
Solar Science
The Sun's corona — the faint halo visible only during a total solar eclipse — routinely reaches temperatures of 1 to 2 million degrees Celsius, while the visible surface just below it sits at around 5,500 degrees, a paradox that has puzzled astrophysicists since 1939
Marsdaily
A 70-kilogram person would weigh the equivalent of about 26.5 kilograms on Mars and could reach 2.65 times their Earth jump height
Science
In April 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 kilometres above Earth—inside the orbit of geostationary satellites—and NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will follow close behind to see what Earth’s gravity did to it
Eclipses
On August 12, a total solar eclipse is about to plunge Greenland, Iceland, and Spain into darkness
Aerospace