Materials
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 558 articles · Back to full archive
Tech Space
SpaceX built the most powerful rocket in history without landing legs on its upper stage, designing it instead to be caught after re-entry by a pair of giant arms on the launch tower — and Elon Musk now says the first attempt could come within months.
Science
In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a body melting out of a glacier and called the police, assuming it was a lost mountaineer — it turned out to be a 5,300-year-old man with 61 tattoos, an unfinished bow, and an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, making his death the world's oldest open murder investigation
Science
Voyager 2 discovered ten moons when it flew past Uranus in 1986. Nearly 40 years later, James Webb found one it missed: Uranus's 29th known moon, a tiny world only about 10 kilometres wide hiding among the planet's inner moons.
Science
Capybaras and caimans doze inches apart on the same riverbanks across South America, and researchers say the famous truce has nothing to do with friendship — it's a cold calculation that a biting, 45-kilogram rodent simply costs more than it's worth
Science
A PhD student in Sydney just found a “Rosetta Stone” for years of unexplained radio bursts from the Milky Way: a dead star is stripping material from its companion in a 1.4-hour orbit, giving astronomers their clearest look yet at what produces at least some of these mysterious signals.
Aerospace
Clayton Anderson applied to become a NASA astronaut 15 times over 15 years before he was finally selected in 1998 — he later spent more than 167 days in space and completed six spacewalks.
Science
Pluto has a blue twilight: when New Horizons looked back after its 2015 flyby and saw the dwarf planet backlit by the Sun, its atmospheric haze turned out to scatter sunlight blue — a colour that surprised even the mission’s scientists.
Science
The Moon’s far side is not darker, but it is rougher: its crust is about 60 kilometres thick versus 40 on the Earth-facing side, so ancient impacts struggled to punch through and flood it with the dark lava seas that made the familiar face we see
Mind & Meaning
Start with one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and double it on every square, and the 64th square alone would hold more than 9.2 quintillion grains — with more than 18.4 quintillion grains across the whole board.
Science
Neptune sits thirty times farther from the Sun than Earth yet radiates about 2.5 times more energy than it receives — the hidden heat beneath the coldest reaches of the planetary system remains uncertain, even as it helps distinguish Neptune from its strangely quiet twin, Uranus
Human Behaviour
Thought of the day from theologian Paul Tillich: "Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone, and solitude expresses the glory of being alone."
Flora And Fauna
Wild Asian elephants in India have been seen using branches to swat flies, while elephants in a naturalistic captive setting modified branches that were too long or bushy before using them — evidence that elephants can both use and manufacture simple tools
Science
Jupiter pulls so hard on Io that the moon’s solid ground rises and falls by as much as 100 metres every orbit — a tide in rock the height of a 30-storey building, and the repeated flexing powers the most volcanically active world in the Solar System
Science
NASA plans to send a working nuclear reactor toward Mars in late 2028. Space Reactor-1 Freedom will split uranium atoms in deep space to generate electricity for its engines — the first test of a technology NASA hopes will eventually help power human missions across the Solar System.
Science