Launch Pad
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 35 articles · Back to full archive
SpaceWar
Ten wolves in the first winter, 27 by April 2023: Isle Royale's relocated population grew after 19 animals were brought to the Lake Superior island, and modelling now gives better than an 80% chance it persists 20 years
Space Scopes
Roman is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy, who helped build the Great Observatories program from Hubble to Spitzer
Flora And Fauna
In New Mexico's Carlsbad Cavern, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats spiral out each summer evening and eat about three tons of insects, mostly moths and beetles, while Texas colonies intercept corn earworm moths above cotton country
Farm News
Why does breaching a single earthen levee along a Central Valley river reconnect juvenile salmon to floodplain rice fields where they grow up to five times faster than fish stuck in the main channel?
Early Earth
Ancient DNA shows the extinct American cheetah Miracinonyx, long cast as a pronghorn chaser, left Yukon fossils about 31,000 to 34,000 years old from cats that ranged far into the Arctic and ate fish
Nukewars
Why did the US Air Force designate a 106,000-acre live-fire training reservation in the southeastern Coastal Plain as a national stronghold for the red-cockaded woodpecker, and why does controlled artillery use appear to help the bird recover?
Earth
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver manufactured nerve agents and pesticides for four decades, and after a Superfund cleanup the 15,000-acre site became a National Wildlife Refuge now hosting bison, bald eagles, and one of the largest urban prairie dog colonies in the country
Flora And Fauna
Sea otters along California's central coast that habitually use rocks to crack open snails and mussels show measurably less tooth damage than otters that bite prey directly, a difference biologists documented across years of tracking 196 radio-tagged animals at Monterey Bay and four other sites
Constellations
Perseverance filmed Phobos crossing the Sun again on 12 August 2026 — the same potato-shaped moon whose orbit is slowly decaying toward Mars
Climate Science
Between 2011 and 2014, sonar at a 25-acre wetland reopened to Lake Erie recorded nearly 3.44 million fish detections across 2,022 monitoring hours, with traffic in and out of the marsh close to balanced
Floating Steel
Days after the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923, aerial photos showed Yokosuka Naval Arsenal wrecked and the battlecruiser Amagi sitting damaged on the building berth
Energy Tech
At Denmark’s Port of Aalborg, designers cut a retired wind-turbine blade into a curved roof that now shelters bicycles — a second life for the composite piece turbines can’t easily recycle
Tech Space
Portuguese students Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça built Trovador, a six-legged planting robot that in early tests set saplings about 28 percent faster than people with roughly 90 percent survival
Climate Science
In 1988, fires burned 793,880 acres of Yellowstone, and ecologists who expected slower recovery instead watched lodgepole pine seedlings sprout from serotinous cones that had been sealed shut with resin waiting for exactly that heat
Technology News