Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 559 articles · Back to full archive
Science
AI is creating proteins that never existed in nature — a shift that could lead to new drugs, custom enzymes, and entirely new materials evolution itself never got around to building
Science
Brain implants are beginning to move from science fiction into clinical trials: people with paralysis are already testing systems that can turn neural signals into cursor movement, robotic-arm control, and even decoded speech
Science
The Moon is rusting even though it has no air and almost no liquid water — and the leading explanation is that oxygen escaping Earth rides our magnetic tail 385,000 kilometres into space during the few days each month when the solar wind is blocked
Human Behaviour
The blues may carry West African Muslim history inside some of its loneliest notes — echoes of Quranic recitation, prayer, and the call to prayer that crossed the Atlantic before surfacing in the Mississippi Delta
Mind & Meaning
Spain's 10 p.m. dinners are not just a cultural quirk. They are partly the legacy of a 1940 Franco-era clock change that pushed the country ahead of the sun — so Spanish clocks now say 10 p.m. at the moment the sun still says 9
Science
A saltwater crocodile has the most powerful bite ever recorded in a living animal, strong enough to crush bone and hold prey with terrifying force — yet the muscles that open the same jaws are so weak a person can hold them shut with their hands
Science
Scientists thought the exceptionally quiet Sun of 2008 might be slipping into a decades-long lull. Instead the trend reversed, and a NASA study published in September 2025 found that its underlying solar-wind activity has been strengthening for nearly two decades.
Science
JWST found an object in the early universe whose dense hydrogen cocoon made it look eerily like an enormous star — until astronomers realized it was radiating roughly 100 billion times the Sun's luminosity, with a growing black hole hidden inside.
Science
A telescope array still in early construction was pointed at the Helix Nebula and came back with 22 arcs of shocked gas in the faint outskirts — each one carved by an invisible clump of a dead star's ejecta that interstellar space is pulling apart
Outer Planets
Two of Neptune's tiny inner moons contain clay minerals that could not have formed on worlds so small and cold — suggesting they're built from the exposed interiors of much larger moons shattered when the captured Kuiper Belt world Triton tore through Neptune's original satellite system billions of years ago.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Let not future things disturb you, for you will come to them, if it shall be necessary, with the same reason which now you use for present things."
Deep Impact
Astronomers announced in January 2026 that they had found a 710-metre asteroid — nearly eight football fields across — spinning once every 1.88 minutes. A normal rubble-pile asteroid should tear itself apart at anything close to that speed, meaning 2025 MN45 must have internal strength comparable to solid rock.
Science
Right now, without moving a muscle, you are aboard a planet orbiting the Sun at 107,000 kilometres per hour, inside a solar system orbiting the galaxy at 720,000 kilometres per hour, while the Milky Way and Andromeda close on each other at roughly 400,000 kilometres per hour — and you cannot feel any of it.
Flora And Fauna
A drone caught Maserati the dolphin lifting a football-sized shell to trap a fish, then her calf picking it up and trying the same
Aerospace