Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 562 articles · Back to full archive
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
A 250-seat jet is being built with four aisles instead of one. The reason is the shape: when you blend wings directly into a body wide enough to hold a small apartment, a single corridor down the middle no longer makes any sense
Marsdaily
In April 2026, scientists reported that Curiosity had detected the first nitrogen heterocycle on the Martian surface — a class of organic molecule that on Earth forms part of the chemical pathway toward RNA and DNA. It isn't evidence of life, but it shows that ancient Mars possessed surprisingly complex prebiotic chemistry.
Flora And Fauna
A sheep separated from a flock member for over two years will still recognise that face — and researchers measuring brain activity found the neural circuits held a selective encoding of the individual
Science
A moon does not need sunlight to keep its interior warm. Io is ablaze with volcanoes, Europa hides an ocean, and Enceladus leaks heat and water from its south pole into space — worlds kept active by the gravitational grip of planets that never lets go.
Flora And Fauna
Biosphere 2 was built to test whether eight people could survive completely sealed off from the rest of Earth for two years — but inside its glass walls, cockroaches and stowaway ants boomed while most of the birds and pollinators died.
Marsdaily
Mars may hold enough liquid water to cover the entire planet to a depth of 1 to 2 kilometres — trapped in tiny cracks and pores in rock roughly 11.5 to 20 kilometres underground, far beyond anything we've ever been capable of drilling on Mars.
Flora And Fauna
The smell of a freshly mown lawn is one of the most loved scents there is, and it is also the grass releasing an emergency chemical within seconds of being cut — some of it aimed at insects.
Venusian Heat
Scientists reported phosphine in Venus's clouds in 2020, then watched the finding come under fierce attack. But years of follow-up observations have repeatedly recovered the signal with far more data, while no known non-biological process has yet been shown to produce the claimed amounts.
Tech Space
SpaceX spent $15.8 billion building AI compute infrastructure in just three months — more than four times what its entire Space division spent on capital projects throughout 2025. And Elon Musk is already warning that global chip production isn't scaling fast enough to meet AI demand.
Flora And Fauna
We tend to think complex planning is a primate specialty, but a 2017 study found ravens outplanned chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos at a trading task.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Men exist for the sake of one another; teach them then, or bear with them."
Science
In the 1970s, the CIA helped fund a classified psychic-research programme at Stanford Research Institute that later became STARGATE, spending roughly $20 million over two decades to test remote viewing — and ending with results too strange to dismiss cleanly, but too weak to prove psychic perception was real
Flora And Fauna
Tardigrades can survive being frozen, dried out, and blasted with radiation that would kill almost anything else, and when scientists spliced the protein responsible into human cells in a lab, those cells suffered significantly less DNA damage from X-rays.
Psychology