Mars Daily
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 14 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Psychology says the adults who seem calmest in emergencies aren't naturally unflappable, they were the children who couldn't afford to fall apart in front of the adults who were supposed to catch them
Water World
What happened when a US state passed its first serious groundwater law in 2014, after decades of farm wells pulling aquifers down so fast that the ground itself sank by tens of centimetres a year in places?
Bio Fuel
We tend to think wet biomass has to be dried before it can become fuel, but a Korean team showed the water trapped inside coffee grounds can itself drive the reaction, vaporising under plasma flames and rupturing each particle in microscopic explosions they call the popcorn effect
Mars Daily
On 16 July 1945, the Trinity atomic test contaminated about 1,100 square miles of New Mexico with radioactive fallout, according to declassified accounts
Early Earth
A six-year-old Norwegian boy found a 1,200-year-old iron sword while collecting rocks for a school craft project
Mars Daily
In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase put a kitchen Waring blender to work at Cold Spring Harbor, spinning virus-infected bacteria fast enough to shear off the protein coats while leaving the injected DNA inside, and settled a decades-long argument by showing that genes are made of nucleic acid, not protein
Mars Daily
Mars’s atmosphere gives sound two effective speeds, divided at about 240 hertz—just below middle C. Perseverance measured low tones travelling at roughly 240 metres per second and higher tones at about 250, meaning the treble can arrive before the bass.
Wood Pile
How did a Central American country smaller than West Virginia go from one of the worst deforestation rates on Earth in the 1980s to doubling its forest cover in a single generation?
Aerospace
On 12 August 2026, Heart Aerospace's X1 lifted off from Plattsburgh, New York, weighing more than 25,000 pounds with a 106-foot wingspan, and flew for 27 minutes on roughly $5 of electricity — the largest battery-electric aircraft ever to leave the ground
Space Scopes
On 14 April, the 5,000 fibre-optic eyes of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument locked onto a patch of sky near the Little Dipper and completed the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made, tracing dark energy's pull across 11 billion years of cosmic history
Mars Daily
People who keep old birthday cards, faded ticket stubs, and handwritten notes in a drawer they rarely open aren't sentimental hoarders, they're keeping proof that certain moments actually happened
Terradaily
Terra reached its final Earth orbit on 24 February 2000 after 11 weeks of checkout and eight ascent burns, and mission scientists stopped nudging its inclination back in 2020, letting the satellite quietly drift out of its contained orbit as retirement approaches
Mars Daily