Science
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 43 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium: "We have two ears and only one mouth, that we may hear more and speak less."
Outer Planets
Pluto’s atmosphere has probably persisted in some form for millions of years, but observations suggest its pressure fell 16% between mid-2021 and July 2023. With Pluto continuing away from the Sun until 2114, astronomers may be witnessing the beginning of its nitrogen sky slowly freezing onto the surface.
Flora And Fauna
In the 1930s a handful of cane toads were released on Australian sugar farms to eat a beetle they turned out to be unable to reach, and from roughly 100 animals they have since bred into well over 200 million, spreading west across the continent faster each year.In the 1930s a handful of cane toads were released on Australian sugar farms to eat a beetle they turned out to be unable to reach, and from roughly 100 animals they have since bred into well over 200 million, spreading west across the continent faster each year.
Asia News
For decades Pakistan's snow leopard population was a guess, put somewhere between 100 and 400 animals from questionnaires and expert hunches, until a decade-long survey of 828 cameras and more than 1,000 genetic scat samples finally produced a real number, and it landed near the bottom of that range.
Solar Science
A blistering lava world and a larger planet sitting in the habitable zone have been confirmed orbiting the same red dwarf 337 light-years away, a rare pairing that has put the system near the top of astronomers' list for probing whether an alien world can hold an atmosphere.
Marsdaily
The organic carbon Perseverance found in Jezero Crater’s ancient river mudstones lies more than 3,500 kilometres from organic molecules detected by Curiosity in Gale Crater—evidence that the chemical ingredients associated with life may have been widespread across ancient Mars, rather than confined to a single lake system.
Exo Life
Shallow hydrothermal vents are one of the few places on Earth where sunlight-driven and chemistry-driven food webs share the same square metre of seafloor
Space Travel
A Soviet probe survived the journey to Venus and began testing the surface of another world — only for its soil instrument to come down on a discarded piece of the spacecraft itself and send the mistaken reading all the way back to Earth
Human Behaviour
Rome pulls around €1.5 million in coins from the Trevi Fountain every year and gives it to a Catholic charity — workers sweep the coins into long piles and vacuum them through suction hoses as new wishes keep landing in the water
Space Travel
After travelling 122 million miles in orbit, retired space shuttle Endeavour needed 68 hours to cover its final 12 miles through Los Angeles — crawling at no more than 2 mph as crews removed more than 400 trees to clear its 78-foot wingspan
Flora And Fauna
New York restaurants send their used oyster shells to Governors Island, where they cure outdoors before being returned to the harbor as hard substrate for new reefs, and by the end of 2025 the Billion Oyster Project had collected 3.2 million pounds of shell and restored more than 180 million oysters across New York Harbor.
Flora And Fauna
In 1989, media billionaire Ted Turner bought the 113,613-acre Flying D ranch in Montana, removed its cattle and hundreds of miles of internal barbed-wire fencing, and shifted the land to bison — 37 years later, the property supports about 4,500 of them.
Cosmology
In November 2025, astronomers argued that an overlooked age bias in supernova measurements meant the universe had already begun decelerating and dark energy was weakening. A Southampton-led team challenged that conclusion in June 2026, saying the supposed bias was largely already corrected for—but the original researchers have since disputed the rebuttal.
Flora And Fauna
In 1890 and 1891, New York pharmaceutical manufacturer Eugene Schieffelin released about 100 European starlings into Central Park, and their descendants spread across North America, reaching roughly 200 million birds within a century before declining to a more recent estimate of about 85 million to 93 million
Exo Worlds