Lifestyle
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 63 articles · Back to full archive
Lifestyle
Ray-finned fishes evolved bioluminescence at least 27 chemistry and others by housing luminous bacteria, a repeated evolutionary experiment spread across deep-sea, inshore and reef lineages using different molecular machinery to make visible light
Lifestyle
The Sun is actually white — the yellow we see is Earth's atmosphere scattering the shorter blue wavelengths away before the light reaches our eyes, which is also why sunsets turn red
Tech Explained
In 1858, engineers laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic — it worked for only three weeks before failing, but it cut the message time between London and New York from ten days to a matter of minutes, and set the pattern for every undersea internet cable since
Internet
In 1988, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris released a self-replicating program to measure the size of the internet — within hours it had crashed roughly 6,000 of the 60,000 machines then online, and computer security became a field
Tech Explained
Noise-cancelling headphones don't block sound, they generate its exact mirror image — a microphone samples the incoming wave, and the driver plays an inverted copy that meets it and cancels to near silence
Tech Explained
When you delete a file, the data itself stays on the disk untouched — the operating system only removes the pointer to it, which is why forensic tools can recover files months after they seem to have vanished
Tech Explained
The Apollo guidance computer that landed astronauts on the Moon ran on 64 kilobytes of memory, and its programs were literally woven by hand — women at Raytheon threaded copper wire through tiny magnetic cores, one bit at a time
Internet
In July 2026, Psy’s Gangnam Style passed six billion YouTube views, fourteen years after its horse-riding dance became the platform’s first billion-view video and long after engineers had replaced a counter designed to stop at 2,147,483,647
Tech Explained
Your phone does not actually know how much battery it has left; a fuel-gauge chip estimates the percentage from current, voltage, temperature, and a model of the cell, with a late correction sometimes turning 15 percent into 3 percent in less than a minute
Lifestyle
Each year, roughly 27.7 million tonnes of dust lift off the Sahara, cross the Atlantic on the trade winds, and fall on the Amazon — carrying the phosphorus the rainforest needs to keep growing
Gadgets
The GPS satellites orbiting 20,200 kilometres overhead run their clocks about 38 microseconds faster per day than clocks on the ground — without Einstein's relativity correcting for it, GPS would drift by roughly 10 kilometres every 24 hours
Tech Explained
When you type an address into a browser, your computer first asks a DNS resolver for the site's IP — a query that may bounce through your router, your ISP, and one of just 13 root server clusters before the page ever begins to load
Psychology
Psychology says the rarest mental strength today isn't resilience or grit — it's the ability to sit with uncertainty without immediately seeking distraction, explanation, or someone else's opinion about what you should feel
Psychology
Psychology says the loneliest people in life aren't the ones nobody likes — they're the kind, helpful people everyone appreciates but nobody thinks to check on because they seem so self-sufficient
Tech Explained
Voyager 1 is still transmitting from more than 25 billion kilometres away, powered by less than 250 watts of decaying plutonium — a signal that now takes over 23 hours to reach Earth, carried by a radio no stronger than a refrigerator lightbulb
Tech Explained
In September 1947, engineers at Harvard pulled a moth from a relay inside the Mark II computer, taped it into the logbook, and wrote 'first actual case of bug being found' — the pest was literal
Lifestyle
Behavioral scientists found that people without children develop a relationship to mortality that is psychologically distinct — without biological continuation, they must construct meaning through contribution, connection, and presence rather than lineage, and that construction is both harder and, when successful, more intentional than most people realize
Lifestyle
Psychology says people who stack their plates and tidy up before leaving a restaurant aren't trying to impress anyone — they never forgot what it felt like to be the one who had to clean up after people who didn't
Lifestyle