Science
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 43 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
A high-school student's idea sent two spiders to a US space station to see whether they could still spin a web with no gravity to hang it from, and they did, building lopsided, confused webs at first before adjusting, and one of the spiders, named Gladys, turned out on return to be male and was renamed Gladstone.
Cosmology
Venus comes nearer to Earth than any other planet, yet averaged over time the closest planet to Earth is Mercury — and by the same arithmetic Mercury is also the closest planet to Neptune, because a body hugging the Sun can never wander far from anyone
Exo Worlds
After nearly 70 years of searching, humanity has found no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life—only potential biosignatures in a Martian rock, disputed chemistry 124 light-years away, and thousands of UAP reports that may have nothing to do with aliens at all. The answer, whatever it is, still arrives only in fragments.
Science
Par Pond, a 2,300-acre South Carolina reservoir dug to cool two plutonium production reactors, now holds several hundred alligators, and researchers keep catching, testing and releasing them, because an animal that lives 40 to 70 years carries the site's whole contamination record in its blood
Earth News
In 1978, Eleanor “Sandy” West and her family sold Georgia’s 26,000-acre Ossabaw Island to the state for half its appraised value while retaining the right to use the family home for the rest of her life; she lived on the island until 2016, died at 108 in 2021, and the preservation agreement still prohibits a bridge or causeway to the mainland.
Space Travel
At the space shuttle’s orbital speed of roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, the journey to Alpha Centauri would take about 165,000 years. Breakthrough Starshot proposes sending a gram-scale chip attached to a metre-wide sail—accelerated by Earth-based lasers—to make the same journey in just over 20 years.
Science
For most of human history, anyone standing beneath a clear, moonless sky could see the Milky Way. Electric light began erasing that view little more than a century ago—and today, artificial skyglow hides our galaxy from more than one-third of humanity.
Flora And Fauna
In 1859, Australian landowner Thomas Austin imported 24 wild rabbits from England and released 13 of them at his Barwon Park estate so he and his friends would have something familiar to hunt — and their descendants spread across almost the entire continent within 50 years.
Stellar Chemistry
Dead stars are supposed to cool steadily into darkness, but Gaia found a population whose brightness has barely changed for at least eight billion years—and the leading explanation is crystals floating inside them like ice cubes, forcing heavier liquid downward and releasing enough gravitational energy to keep the stars glowing.
Early Earth