Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 663 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
In 1980 NASA had to choose between sending Voyager 1 past Titan or keeping it on a course that could reach Pluto, and it picked Titan, ending the mission's planet-hopping for good — the flyby flung the probe out of the plane of the planets, and it never made another planetary encounter
Science
In the early 2000s about one in a hundred published cancer research papers showed signs of coming from a fraudulent paper mill, and by 2022 that number had climbed to nearly one in six
Saturn Daily
Rain does fall on Titan, but models suggest some regions wait decades between storms, and then get hit hard — the dry low latitudes appear to get their weather in rare violent downpours clustered around the equinoxes
Space Industry
A newly identified order of Australian marsupials survived in Queensland rainforests for more than 35 million years, and it vanished so completely that no descendants of it are alive today
Science
Bees have never been documented nesting inside animal bone in the history of paleontology, until researchers found six nests stacked inside one 20,000-year-old tooth socket
Marsdaily
When a NASA microphone recorded the first sounds on Mars in 2021 it found something unexpected: sound above about 240 hertz travels roughly ten metres a second faster, so high-pitched parts of a sound can arrive before the bass
Science
Chernobyl’s exclusion zone, emptied of most human activity after the 1986 nuclear disaster, is now home to abundant populations of wolves, lynx, deer, and introduced Przewalski’s horses—with one major study finding several large mammals as numerous as in nearby uncontaminated reserves, while wolves were more than seven times as abundant.
Science
A 2025 study tested whether impacts could keep Titan’s methane skies alive and found that a 20-kilometre object released up to 1% of the atmosphere’s methane directly, while even favourable impact histories extended its lifetime by no more than 3%, leaving the source of its rivers and rain unresolved
Mind & Meaning
North Korea built an entire town inside the DMZ for a population that was never going to exist — brightly painted apartment blocks with lights that switch on and off on a timer, and, by most accounts, not a single family living behind any of the windows
Mind & Meaning
Google Earth, the CIA, and National Geographic all once trusted that an island existed in the Coral Sea until it vanished in 2012, when an expedition proved a single 19th-century whaling ship's mistake had been quietly copied onto official maps for more than a hundred years
Mind & Meaning
On October 27, 1962, the fate of the planet came down to one man's judgement inside an overheated Soviet submarine — the captain had ordered a nuclear torpedo readied against American ships, and it took one calmer head to stop him
Culture
In 1963, the average woman on had about 5.3 children, and the world feared running out of room — the figure is now about 2.2. Global fertility has more than halved in six decades, and the UN projects it will fall below the replacement rate around 2050
Mind & Meaning
In 1943, British intelligence planted a dead body off the coast of Spain carrying fake invasion plans, dressed as a fictional officer with a made-up love life and unpaid bills sewn into his pockets for realism — and Hitler believed every word of it, moving his troops away from the real target and leaving it exposed
Outer Planets
A 2026 study modelling Europa's interior finds its seafloor is probably too quiet for the hydrothermal vents that support life in Earth's oceans, while a separate paper the same month proposes nutrients could reach its ocean anyway, carried down by sinking pockets of salty ice
Science