Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 669 articles · Back to full archive
Water Worlds
More than two million lakes sit inside a single country, gouged out by Ice Age glaciers that spent tens of thousands of years grinding it into a landscape of water
Science
Enceladus hides a salty ocean beneath its ice but also blasts that ocean directly into space, which means a spacecraft can test water from a potentially habitable sea simply by flying through the plume — no landing, drilling, or journey through kilometres of frozen crust required.
Human Behaviour
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch were among the shortest people in Europe. Today they remain among the tallest on the planet, with young men standing about 1.83 metres on average. Rising prosperity, better nutrition and improved healthcare added nearly 20 centimetres in roughly 150 years
Mind & Meaning
That salmon on your sushi plate feels like an ancient Japanese tradition, but it isn't — until the 1990s the Japanese didn't eat raw salmon at all, and the reason they do now traces back to a Norwegian marketing campaign
Mind & Meaning
When scientists first uncovered the ancient mummies of western China, their European-looking faces and fair hair suggested they were travelers who had wandered east from Europe — but their DNA told a stranger story: they were a local people who had lived there, isolated, for thousands of years
Technology
Sony's wearable air conditioner doesn't lower the temperature around you at all — it chills one small patch of skin at the base of your neck, where the body's heat sensors are so concentrated that cooling that single spot fools the entire body into feeling cool
Mind & Meaning
Houston spent nearly 3 billion dollars widening a single freeway to 26 lanes to kill its traffic — and within three years the drive was taking up to 51 per cent longer, proof of a rule planners keep relearning the hard way: you can't build your way out of a traffic jam
Political Economy
In Monaco, more than two in every five residents are millionaires — the highest share of any city on Earth, packed into a country smaller than New York's Central Park. Most residents pay no personal income tax, and you could walk from one end of the whole nation to the other in about an hour
Mind & Meaning
The highest-grossing entertainment franchise in the world isn't Star Wars, Marvel or Mickey Mouse — it's Pokémon, which began as a Japanese video game about collecting creatures and has since rung up north of a hundred billion dollars in retail sales
Mind & Meaning
Most people can hold their breath underwater for a minute or two, but a people called the Bajau can spend up to five hours a day underwater, diving to depths that would unnerve a scuba diver — and scientists have traced the ability to a change written into their very DNA
Aerospace
Every ninety minutes, the crew orbiting high above Earth watches another sunrise break over the planet, which means that in a single day they see sixteen dawns and sixteen dusks, and their bodies have no idea what time it is anymore.
Marsdaily
Mars is usually named as humanity's most likely second home, but a NASA-funded study concluded it cannot be terraformed with present technology, and until that changes, living there would mean sealing yourself against near-vacuum, deep cold and steady radiation
Flora And Fauna
A Yellowstone bison can hit 35 miles an hour — faster than Usain Bolt at his world-record best, and about twice as quick as you can run. Which is precisely why the park's one-ton "fluffy cows" injure more visitors every year than any other animal there
Deep Impact
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was around ten kilometres wide and hit 66 million years ago, and a 2024 study of rare metals in the debris it left behind traced its birthplace to beyond Jupiter, in the outer solar system
Flora And Fauna