Earth Observation
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 25 articles · Back to full archive
Nukewars
The SR-71 Blackbird cruised at Mach 3.2 above 25,000 metres, and its titanium skin ran so hot in flight that the fuselage grew about 10 centimetres longer, which is why the fuel tanks were designed to leak on the ground and only seal once the plane heated up in the air
Nukewars
Friedrich Miescher spent the winter of 1869 rinsing pus off surgical bandages collected from a Tübingen clinic to isolate what he called nuclein, a phosphorus-rich substance from white blood cell nuclei that the world would take another 75 years to recognise as DNA
Farm News
What happened when a Great Plains dust storm in 1935 blackened the sky over Washington DC on the very day a soil scientist was testifying to Congress about erosion?
Space Travel
In July 1962, a missing overbar in Mariner 1’s guidance equation helped send the Venus probe off course 293 seconds after launch, forcing range safety to destroy NASA’s $18.5 million mission
Nukewars
Why does roughly 27 million tonnes of desert dust cross an ocean each year to fertilise a rainforest on the other side of the planet?
Nukewars
How did a Southeast Asian city-state with no large natural rivers or usable groundwater engineer enough recycled water to meet roughly 40 percent of its total demand?
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How did a windswept North Atlantic island once almost entirely stripped of its birch forests by Viking settlers push tree cover from less than 1 percent back toward 2 percent, tree by stubborn tree?
Nukewars