Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 760 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
Quote by author Ursula K. Le Guin: “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from writer C.S. Lewis: "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."
Deep Impact
On January 27, 2025, asteroid 2024 YR4 crossed the 1% impact-probability threshold; two days later, the International Asteroid Warning Network sent its first-ever formal asteroid warning to the UN’s space office—activating a planetary-defence protocol created more than a decade earlier but never previously used.
Flora And Fauna
An elephant's trunk has no bones but contains roughly 90,000 muscle units, giving it enough strength to move heavy objects while still allowing it to perform remarkably delicate movements
Tech Space
NASA has demonstrated a satellite that can determine its own orbit without GPS by photographing other spacecraft and debris, matching them against a catalogue of 20,000 objects, and using them as moving landmarks—a first-of-its-kind system that could eventually help spacecraft navigate near the Moon and Mars.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life"
Space Scopes
Trump targeted the Roman Space Telescope for cancellation or crippling cuts four separate times — Congress protected it each time, and the observatory that repeatedly faced extinction is now scheduled to launch nine months early aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Science
Cameras on whale shark fins caught them feeding as deep as 68.8 metres
Earth News
The Amazon River carries more water to the ocean than the next seven largest rivers combined, with an average discharge of roughly 209,000 cubic metres every second
Science
Hours after a Soviet nuclear satellite broke up over Canada in 1978, Moscow's ambassador said the reactor on board had been designed for complete destruction on re-entry — radioactivity had already fallen across 124,000 square kilometres of the country's north, searchers located fragments the formal claim recorded as showing "lethal radioactivity," and Ottawa billed the Soviet Union exactly C$6,041,174.70
Science
Voyager 1 records plasma waves between the stars at frequencies within human hearing, allowing the electrical data to be amplified and played through an ordinary loudspeaker
Science
In 2012, a US spy agency handed NASA two unused Hubble-sized telescope systems that had been sitting in storage in upstate New York — one of their mirrors now forms the heart of Roman, an observatory launching with Hubble-like sharpness across a field at least 100 times larger.
Science
Before he was old enough to drive, a 14-year-old talked a university physics department into lending him a sub-basement — the machine he assembled there fused atoms in a plasma hotter than the sun's core and made him the youngest person ever to achieve nuclear fusion
Climate Science
The upper 2,000 metres of the ocean gained an estimated 23 zettajoules of heat in 2025—roughly 39 times all the energy humanity uses in a year—driving ocean heat content to a record for the ninth consecutive year, the longest unbroken streak ever measured.
Science