A Space Daily column

Human Element

Psychology and behaviour

Human Element covers the psychology of discovery. How astronauts hold up under pressure, why people believe what they believe, and what research on the human mind can and cannot tell us.

Mind & Meaning

To read a newspaper in Japan, a person needs to know three completely different writing systems used simultaneously — hiragana for native Japanese words, katakana for foreign loan-words, and kanji for concepts borrowed from Chinese roughly 1,500 years ago — plus romaji, the Latin alphabet Japanese schoolchildren learn to type their language into computers and phones

Reading the front page of a Japanese-language newspaper in 2026 requires, at minimum, four things.

Jul 6, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On the morning of December 26, 2004, a 10-year-old British girl named Tilly Smith was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand when she noticed the sea frothing and receding exactly as her geography teacher had taught her two weeks earlier — and her warning saved roughly 100 lives that morning

On the morning of Sunday, 26 December 2004 — about two hours after a 9.1-magnitude megathrust earthquake had ruptured the Indian Ocean seafloor 250 kilometres…

Jul 6, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 2014, a neuroscientist named Gregory Berns trained a group of dogs to lie completely still inside a functional MRI scanner and measured what happened in their brains when they smelled their owners — and the reward centers of the dogs’ brains lit up more brightly for their owners than for any other scent, including the scent of other dogs in their own households

In March 2014, three American researchers published a paper in Behavioural Processes titled "Scent of the Familiar: An fMRI Study of Canine Brain Responses to Familiar and Unfamiliar Human and Dog Odors.

Jul 6, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For almost 15 years, a retired psychology professor worked with his Border Collie Chaser for four to five hours a day — and by the time he stopped adding new toys because his house had run out of room, Chaser could correctly identify 1,022 different toys by their individual names

In June 2004, in the specific suburb of Spartanburg, South Carolina where the 76-year-old retired psychology professor emeritus John W.

Jul 6, 2026

Human Behaviour

Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren’t imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light

The drifting spots you see when you stand up too fast are not imaginary. A brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the photoreceptors, running on some of the most expensive metabolism in the body, fire phantom signals as their power fails.

Jul 6, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The word ‘spam’ for unwanted email comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch set in a diner where every dish contained Spam — Spam and eggs, Spam and bacon, Spam and sausage — while Vikings at a nearby table chanted the name over and over, a joke internet users borrowed 20 years later

On the evening of Tuesday, 15 December 1970, at approximately 10:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the BBC1 television network in the United Kingdom broadcast the…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018

On Saturday, 17 November 2018, at around 3:00 in the afternoon local time, a 26-year-old American evangelical missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Between 2002 and 2012, at least six people were killed in the Philippines while singing Frank Sinatra’s 1969 song My Way at karaoke bars — a phenomenon that came to be known internationally as the My Way killings, and that prompted many Filipino karaoke bars to quietly remove the song from their playlists

In February 2010, the American journalist Norimitsu Onishi, then serving as the Manila bureau chief of the New York Times, filed a 1,200-word feature story…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

When the American national soccer team arrived in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, its 11 players were a school teacher, a hearse driver, and a Haitian dishwasher from Manhattan who had never played together and had trained together only once — and on June 29 in Belo Horizonte, they beat the mighty English team 1 to 0

On Thursday, 29 June 1950, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, the eleven starting members of the United States football team took the pitch at the Estádio…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for Antarctica with 28 men and a ship called the Endurance — and 22 months later, after the ship was crushed by pack ice and the men had lived on drifting ice floes and a barren island for nearly two years, every one of them came home alive

On Saturday, 8 August 1914 — five days after the British declaration of war against the German Empire that would produce the subsequent four-year catastrophe…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film’s black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today

In late 2012, the American film director Christopher Nolan formally took over a Warner Brothers science-fiction project that had been drifting through…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

During the Second World War, the American company Hormel shipped more than 100 million pounds of canned Spam to Allied soldiers on every front from the Pacific islands to the Soviet Red Army — and after the war, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that without American Spam, the Soviet Union would not have been able to feed its army

In July 1937, the George A. Hormel and Company meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota — under the direction of Jay Hormel, the 44-year-old First World War…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right

On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred…

Jul 5, 2026

Psychology

Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you’d expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing

In 2013, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and three colleagues published a paper with a plain title: "Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life.

Jul 5, 2026

Human Behaviour

A genetic analysis of nearly 700,000 people identified 74 distinct locations in the human genome tied to anxiety, 39 of which had never been linked to the condition before

Anxiety is still more often treated as a mood problem than a biology problem. A new study makes that harder to justify.

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn’t something the brain produces, but that explaining it will require physics we haven’t yet discovered

Roger Penrose does not think a computer will ever be conscious, and he does not think a brain running on ordinary neural computation would be conscious either.

Jul 4, 2026