Solar Daily
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 20 articles · Back to full archive
Solar Daily
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 contains tiny silicon carbide grains that formed roughly 7 billion years ago, making them older than the Sun itself and the oldest solid matter ever held in a human hand
Solar Daily
A boiling river runs for roughly 6.4 kilometres through the Peruvian Amazon at temperatures near 100 degrees Celsius with no volcano within 700 kilometres, heated instead by geothermal water rising along a fault the local shamans mapped centuries before geologists arrived
Solar Daily
How does a conifer presumed extinct for roughly 90 million years survive in a single hidden canyon fewer than 200 kilometres from a major city, with under 100 wild adults left?
Solar Daily
In May 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling exposed hydrated DNA fibres to X-rays for 62 hours at King's College London, producing the photograph whose sharp cross helped reveal the double helix before Watson and Crick built their correct model
Solar Daily
Some tardigrades can survive space vacuum, brief heat above boiling, near-absolute-zero cold, and radiation around 1,000 times the human lethal dose by collapsing into a dehydrated tun and deploying a molecular survival toolkit
Solar Daily
Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, and roughly two-thirds of their nervous system lives in their arms, meaning each limb can taste, decide, and react to a passing crab without waiting for the central brain to weigh in
Solar Daily
How did a low-lying delta nation that lost about 138,000 people to a 1991 cyclone build a green belt and wider coastal defence, and how many died when another powerful storm struck in 2007?
Solar Daily
Solar modules first switched on in 1979 and permanently installed at the University of Oldenburg in 1983 are still producing almost as much electricity as when they were first installed more than four decades later
Solar Daily
What happened when a doctor traced a deadly 1854 London outbreak to a single street pump, removed its handle, and effectively invented modern epidemiology in the process?
Solar Daily
Most rooftop monocrystalline solar cells begin as wafers sliced from one continuous crystal pulled from molten silicon at 1,414 degrees Celsius, in a growth cycle that can run for roughly two days before the finished panel reaches a roof
Solar Daily
How does a spacecraft launched in 1977, now more than 24 billion kilometres away, still transmit data back to Earth on roughly the power of a hallway light bulb?
Solar Daily
Lithium-ion battery electrodes can now be regenerated to about 95 percent of original capacity in an electrochemical bath that skips shredding, smelting, and acid leaching entirely, treating a dead cell more like a rechargeable one than a bag of scrap metal
Solar Daily
In 1665, Robert Hooke pressed a sliver of cork under his hand-ground microscope, saw tiny empty chambers that reminded him of monks' rooms, and named them cells in a folio so lavish that Samuel Pepys stayed up until two in the morning reading it
Solar Daily
Sunlight striking a rooftop panel takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to arrive from the Sun, but the photons themselves spent roughly 100,000 years bouncing through the Sun's dense interior before reaching its surface
Psychology