Science
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 566 articles · Back to full archive
Science
93 percent of the Moon’s width slides into Earth’s dark inner shadow on the night of August 27, and because the rim left outside it may stay hundreds of times brighter, the Moon will look bitten rather than red
Science
The only spacecraft ever to directly sample Jupiter’s atmosphere was a single probe dropped into the planet in 1995. It transmitted for just 58 minutes before being destroyed — meaning our only in-situ measurements of Jupiter’s clouds come from one brief descent through one unusually dry patch of an atmosphere larger than Earth itself.
Moon Daily
NASA scientists found the Moon's 18.6-year wobble will amplify ordinary high tides on U.S. coastlines starting in the mid-2030s — meaning some streets could start flooding on calm, sunny days for no visible reason
Marsdaily
Mars dirt looks deceptively ordinary, yet samples contain around 0.5% perchlorate salts that can disrupt the human thyroid — meaning the red dust astronauts track inside their habitat could be chemically toxic as well as annoyingly impossible to keep out.
Flora And Fauna
Octopuses are technically colourblind — their eyes only have one type of light-sensing cell — and yet they can match the colour beneath them in under a second, which researchers think is because their skin can sense colour directly
Mind & Meaning
Researchers in Finland tracked children's screen time for eight years, expecting to document the damage. The children who spent more hours on screens showed better cognitive processing as teenagers — a result that ran directly against the assumption the study was designed to test
Science
Omega Centauri should contain thousands of stellar-mass black holes, yet astronomers had never identified a single one. In 2026, a University of Utah-led team finally found one by tracking a star through part of a roughly 94-year orbit around an invisible object 4.5 times the Sun’s mass — the first stellar-mass black hole directly detected in the cluster.
Psychology
The man who wrote the best-selling self-help book in history, Think and Grow Rich, claimed the secret came from a private mentorship with Andrew Carnegie — but Carnegie's own meticulously kept visitor records show the two men never met.
Science
For roughly 60 million years, Earth appears to have operated a hidden climate thermostat: when seas rose, shallow sediments trapped more phosphate, starving ocean life and reducing carbon burial, allowing atmospheric CO₂ to rise and warm the planet — while falling seas released the brake, boosting marine productivity and pulling more carbon back out of the atmosphere.
Science
In 1976, Carl Sagan and astrophysicist Edwin Salpeter published a peer-reviewed paper proposing that Jupiter's atmosphere might support an entire aerial ecosystem — sinking microorganisms, buoyant “floaters” potentially kilometres across, and mobile “hunters” that preyed on them — living their entire lives in a world with no solid surface below.
Flora And Fauna
In the hills of northeast India, villagers grow living bridges by guiding the roots of rubber fig trees across rivers for 15 to 30 years — and unlike any bridge built by human hands, the older these get, the stronger they become
Exo Worlds
At 23.5 times Earth’s mass, GJ 523b is massive enough that standard planet-formation models struggle to explain why it didn’t accumulate a huge hydrogen-helium envelope — yet the planet is extraordinarily dense and apparently mostly rock, and astronomers still don’t know how it ended up that way.
Aerospace
Mir circled Earth more than 86,000 times and hosted 104 people from twelve countries, but none of that scale decided whether it kept flying in 2001 — the cost of keeping it up did
Tech Space
NASA lost its Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 not because of a rocket failure, but because Lockheed Martin software reported thruster impulse in pound-force-seconds while NASA navigation software expected newton-seconds — a unit mismatch that sent the spacecraft dangerously deep into the Martian atmosphere and doomed the mission.
Technology