Flora And Fauna
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 670 articles · Back to full archive
Outer Planets
Saturn's moon Titan has an atmosphere thicker than Earth's and seas you could sail on, and it is the one place beyond Earth where a person could stand outside without a pressure suit, though its surface sits at about minus 179 degrees Celsius
Flora And Fauna
The Velociraptor stalking the kitchen in Jurassic Park was nearly two metres tall and scaly. The real animal barely reached your knee — about 15 kilos, roughly turkey-sized, and covered in feathers, with the quill anchor points still visible on a fossil forearm
Outer Planets
Saturn's moon Titan has rivers of liquid methane longer than the Nile's tributaries, but a 2025 Brown University study found that only 1.3% of those rivers form deltas — on Earth, nearly every river does, and nobody yet knows why Titan's don't
Black Holes
The James Webb telescope keeps finding supermassive black holes in the infant universe so large that a few appear to outweigh every star in their host galaxy combined, a ratio the standard picture of how these giants grew cannot easily explain
Science
Asteroid Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of chaos, will pass closer to Earth on 13 April 2029 than many weather satellites do — roughly 32,000 kilometres from the surface — and up to 90% of the world's population may see it with the naked eye
Weather Report
The hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth was logged in Death Valley, but many meteorologists no longer believe it — a 2016 review called the 134-degree reading essentially impossible, yet it remains the official record because nobody has withdrawn it
Flora And Fauna
The trees of the Amazon pump such staggering amounts of moisture into the air that they create invisible rivers in the sky, and those rivers travel thousands of kilometres to water farmland in countries far from the forest itself
Outer Planets
Europa is smaller than Earth's Moon, yet the ocean locked beneath its ice contains more liquid water than every ocean on Earth combined — kept from freezing not by sunlight, but by Jupiter's gravity squeezing the moon like a slow, endless fist
Psychology
Psychology suggests who you end up close to isn't decided by looks or shared passions — it's proximity, plain nearness, because liking tends to grow for whoever we simply keep seeing, again and again
Mind & Meaning
For nearly a century, absinthe was banned across the Western world as a hallucinogen that drove artists to madness — then chemists tested the old pre-ban bottles and found nothing special at all, no secret in the wormwood, just an unusually strong liquor that people drank far too much of
Mind & Meaning
On the island of Sardinia there's a cheese so extreme it's been outlawed across Europe — a pecorino deliberately left open for flies to lay their eggs in, so that by the time it reaches the table it's alive with thousands of tiny maggots, eaten while they're still squirming
Mind & Meaning
The densest place that has ever been measured on Earth was a single Hong Kong block where 33,000 people lived stacked in six and a half acres — a self-built maze of 350 towers raised without a single architect, so tightly packed that sunlight never reached the lowest floors
Psychology