Space Travel
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 11 articles · Back to full archive
Flora And Fauna
A parasitic crustacean called Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills, causes most of its tongue to degenerate, and then attaches itself to the remaining stump, where it may serve as a mechanical replacement
Carbon Worlds
Why does draining a waterlogged bog only a few metres deep release more carbon into the atmosphere than clearing an equivalent area of tropical rainforest?
Flora And Fauna
The heaviest living thing on Earth is a single Utah aspen with 47,000 trunks, and after years of headlines saying deer were eating it to death, the people who fence and monitor it now say new stems are finally growing back
Farm News
What happened when a low-lying European country stopped fighting its rivers with higher walls and instead deliberately flooded farmland to give the water somewhere to go?
Space Travel
Michael Collins spent roughly 21 hours alone in the Apollo 11 command module while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface, and for 48 minutes of each orbit he was on the far side of the Moon with no radio contact to Earth, further from another human than anyone before him
Climate Science
What happened when a South Asian delta nation, battered by a 1991 cyclone that killed roughly 138,000 people, planted a living green wall of salt-tolerant trees along its coast?
Water World
How did a Chinese plateau bigger than France, shedding 1.6 billion tonnes of silt a year into a river it stained yellow, cut that load to roughly a fifth within a single generation?
Earth Observation
How did a sealed limestone cave in eastern Europe stay cut off from the surface for 5.5 million years and grow a food web fed by chemistry instead of sunlight?
Space Travel
The Apollo 12 crew brought back Surveyor 3’s camera after 31 months on the Moon, and NASA reported finding live Streptococcus bacteria inside it, but later evidence pointed to contamination in Houston
Space Travel