July 2026

Every article published in July 2026. 66 articles · Back to full archive

Climate Science

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 24, 2026

Early Earth

A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 24, 2026

Climate Science

How did a peninsula stripped almost bare by war and firewood cutting in 1953 grow back into a country roughly two-thirds covered in forest within a single lifetime?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Pando, a single quaking aspen in Utah, covers 106 acres as roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems sharing one root system, making it one organism that has been quietly cloning itself for an estimated 14,000 years.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Behavioural researchers found that running on habit carried measurably less stress than making conscious choices — which is why the brain quietly converts more and more of a life into automatic routine, one domain at a time

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Uncategorized

In December 1938 a museum curator sifting through a fisherman's catch in a South African port lifted out a heavy blue fish that science had known only from fossils and presumed extinct since the age of the dinosaurs

By Brendan Brown · Jul 23, 2026

Uncategorized

Cognitive scientists have a name for the experience of suddenly realizing you've been reading a book for several minutes without absorbing any of the words — "mind-wandering" — and recent research suggests humans spend roughly 47 percent of waking life in some version of this state, which means the default condition of consciousness is mostly somewhere other than the present

By Brendan Brown · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Tardigrades survived 10 days of open space in a 2007 European Space Agency experiment, exposed to raw solar radiation and a vacuum that would rupture human lungs, and some of them came home and laid viable eggs.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 22, 2026

Terra Daily

We assume loneliness comes from having no one around, but UCLA researchers found people can feel most isolated inside crowded social lives—when every relationship stays warm on the surface and reaches nothing underneath

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Terra Daily

When a Harvard study pinged thousands of people at random moments, minds were wandering elsewhere nearly half of all waking hours — and people were measurably less happy while their attention was away than while it stayed where their body was

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Flora and Fauna

In the 1930s bedbugs had nearly vanished from developed homes, and their global comeback since the late 1990s is traced largely to the insects evolving resistance to the very insecticides that once wiped them out

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Climate Science

In 1854, John Snow removed the handle from a single water pump on Broad Street in Soho and the cholera outbreak that had killed 616 people in ten days effectively stopped, a decision made decades before anyone accepted that water could carry disease.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Uncategorized

In August 1965, a tiny island called Singapore was forcibly expelled from Malaysia with no natural resources and a population poorer than most African nations — and within sixty years had transformed into one of the wealthiest countries on Earth

By Brendan Brown · Jul 21, 2026

Uncategorized

Every volcano on Earth is supposed to form in one of three ways — and Mount Etna, the most active volcano in Europe, fits none of them: it sits over a subduction zone but erupts the lava of a hotspot that isn't there, and geologists have spent decades unable to say why

By Brendan Brown · Jul 21, 2026

Climate Science

Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, and roughly two-thirds of their neurons live in their arms, meaning each limb can taste, decide, and problem-solve without checking in with the central brain.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

Terra Daily

We tend to think a full year should feel long, but memory researchers find the brain stores mainly what is new — which is why the years feel shorter as life grows predictable and the internal camera quietly switches off

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 20, 2026