Moon Daily
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 99 articles · Back to full archive
Flora And Fauna
A handful of huskies imported from Labrador in the 1940s and topped up with dogs from Greenland became the ancestors of a sledge dog population that hauled supplies across the ice for nearly half a century, until a treaty banning all non-native animals forced the last of them to be removed from the continent entirely in February 1994.
Venusian Heat
For nearly 50 years, Venus’s clouds have been understood as droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid—but a 2025 reinterpretation of data inadvertently collected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Large Probe in 1978 suggests their aerosols may instead be about 60 per cent bound water by mass, locked largely inside hydrated iron and magnesium salts.
Flora And Fauna
In the 1990s a few Burmese pythons, once pet snakes let loose or escaped in Florida, found the Everglades so perfectly suited to them that they have since bred into a population thought to run into the tens of thousands, and in the worst-hit areas the raccoons, opossums and rabbits have almost entirely vanished from the night.
Oil And Gas
A London water utility found that the fat and grease clogging its sewers, the notorious "fatbergs," could be skimmed, processed and turned into biodiesel, so the same congealed cooking oil that once blocked the pipes beneath the city now helps fuel vehicles driving above them
Marsdaily
Scientists often model Mars’s interior as a set of uniform spherical layers, but 16 years of tracking data from three NASA orbiters reveals something radically uneven: the mantle beneath the southern highlands may be up to 720 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than beneath the northern lowlands—and researchers still don’t know whether persistent mantle upwelling, an insulating crust or the after-effects of an ancient giant impact created it.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "when one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight"
Technology
In 2019, astronomers linked eight radio observatories spread across four continents into a single virtual telescope the size of Earth, and after two years of assembling five petabytes of recorded data by hand, the combined instrument produced the first-ever photograph of a black hole’s shadow.
Human Behaviour
Workers renovating a centuries-old French manor broke into a wall and found 239 gold coins hidden inside — minted under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the forgotten hoard had been sitting there for generations and eventually sold for more than €1 million
Science
America's first reconnaissance satellite began as range calculations an engineer penciled on a paper placemat while snowed into a Pennsylvania restaurant, and when it reached orbit in June 1960 its cover story was a real scientific experiment, one whose purpose was to measure radiation from the Sun
Science
Deep in the Amazon, researchers found birds and monkeys passing predator warnings from one species to another — a single alarm can ripple through the canopy as other animals hear it, react and pass the danger on
Earth Observation
Most Earth-imaging satellites orbit a few hundred kilometres up, giving them only minutes over any one location during each pass. EOS-05, launched by ISRO on 4 September 2026, is now climbing towards a geosynchronous orbit roughly 36,000 kilometres above Earth, from where it is designed to keep the same broad region in view and provide near-continuous imagery.
Science
Scientists found a 3.7-billion-year-old chemical fingerprint in Australia’s oldest rocks that lines up with Apollo samples when traced back through time — strengthening evidence that Earth and the Moon were mixed together in a giant ancient impact
Science
Scientists filmed a sperm whale giving birth and watched females from another family line help bring the calf into the world — then repeatedly lift the newborn to the surface and support it there while it was still too weak and uncoordinated to swim properly on its own
Human Behaviour
A former Patagonia CEO handed her Argentine conservation land to the state with a clause attached: it stays protected for at least 99 years, and the deal created or significantly enlarged six national parks on ground she and her husband had been acquiring for conservation since the 1990s with wealth from their business careers.
Science