Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Brendan Brown
Writer at Space Daily

Brendan Brown

Contributor

Brendan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space Daily's three Co-Publishers. He founded The Expert Editor in 2012 and co-founded Global English Editing in 2014, working professionally as an editor before moving into publishing.

Profile on Brown Brothers Media →

Science

Engineers sent robotic “sensor fish” through a Columbia River dam, then subjected 5,767 young salmon to the same pressure drop — revealing that turbine blades are rarely what kill them; their swim bladders expand so violently that organs rupture and gas bubbles lodge in their gills

The real killer inside hydroelectric dams isn't the spinning blades—it's physics: the sudden pressure drop forces fish swim bladders to rupture and sends fatal gas bubbles into their gills.

Science

Marie Curie and her husband Pierre spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride, and the notebooks she kept during those years are still so radioactive they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale

A century after her death, Marie Curie's research notes remain too dangerous to touch—a haunting reminder of the price paid for scientific discovery.

Mind & Meaning

Archaeologists examining a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy found something no one had ever seen before: a page of Homer’s Iliad, used as embalming material — meaning one of the most famous poems in human history spent sixteen centuries wrapped around a body, doing a job no librarian could have imagined

A scrap of Homer's Iliad spent sixteen centuries pressed against a mummy's body, preserved not in a library but in a tomb—revealing an ancient world where the West's greatest poem served purposes far stranger than storytelling.