Nukewars
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 24 articles · Back to full archive
Flora And Fauna
Bristlecone pines growing on the arid slopes of California's White Mountains have been alive for more than 4,800 years, meaning individual trees standing today germinated before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built and have survived every empire since
Nukewars
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard pulled a Wilson six-iron head he had smuggled aboard, clipped it to a lunar sample scoop handle, and hit two golf balls one-handed in a pressurised suit that would not let him bend at the waist
Oil And Gas
Why did a small Andean nation with a Pacific coastline write the rights of nature into its constitution while still permitting oil drilling under one of the most biodiverse rainforests on the planet?
Space Scopes
Margaret Hamilton's Apollo 11 flight software threw a 1202 alarm three minutes before Armstrong landed, and the priority-scheduling logic she had insisted on including let the guidance computer drop lower tasks and keep flying while a radar switch flooded it with data
MILTECH
How did a Cold War nation design fighter jets to launch from 800-metre roads, hide beneath forest canopies, and return to the air within ten minutes?
Earth Observation
In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a sandstone gorge west of Sydney found a stand of trees with waxy, fern-like foliage that turned out to be Wollemi pines, a genus known only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed extinct since the age of dinosaurs
Physics News
In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from a two-week holiday to find a stray mould contaminating a stack of Staphylococcus plates in his St Mary's lab, and the clear ring of dead bacteria around the fungus became the accidental start of the antibiotic era
Carbon Worlds
Why does draining a waterlogged carbon-rich soil for oil palm or pasture release more greenhouse gas per hectare than clearing the rainforest that grew on top of it?
Clone Age
In 1953, Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image labelled Photo 51 sat in a drawer at King's College London when Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without her knowledge, and the dark diffraction cross at its centre gave away DNA's helical shape before she could publish her own analysis
Nukewars
Tardigrades pulled from Antarctic moss can survive a decade without water, temperatures near absolute zero, and a 10-day exposure to the open vacuum of space in 2007, curling into a dehydrated husk they call a tun until conditions improve
Uncategorized
In 1982 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the surface of Venus that survived 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and pressure dense enough to crush a submarine — long enough to scan back two panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange-tinted sky before the heat finally ended the mission
Outer Planets
Titan's methane should have been stripped away by sunlight within tens of millions of years — the fact that it persists after four billion years means something, possibly ice volcanoes venting from the interior, is still replenishing it, and no one yet knows what
Water World
What happened when engineers removed a century-old hydroelectric dam from a New England river, and Atlantic salmon returned to spawning grounds they had not reached in roughly 200 years?
Outer Planets
On Titan, Saturn's largest moon, water is the bedrock — frozen to minus 179 degrees and harder than granite — and the rain, rivers and seas that run over it are not water at all but liquid methane, exactly as it comes out of a gas pipe
Earth Observation