Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Human Element
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

The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name

Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century Persian scholar working in the same Baghdad library across approximately the same twenty-year period between 813 and 833 CE.

Mind & Meaning

In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people’s parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties

The single most-commercially-consequential invention of the late-20th-century Japanese consumer electronics sector was popularised by a self-described mediocre…

Mind & Meaning

When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls

Approximately 26 years after the small dog-shaped robots went on sale, the ones that stopped working are being given Buddhist funerals at a rural temple in Chiba Prefecture.

Mind & Meaning

Between 1849 and 1874, roughly 100,000 Chinese men from Guangdong province were shipped to Peru under contracts they could not read, to work the coastal guano islands and the sugar plantations — and the fusion cuisine their descendants would eventually create is why the city of Lima today has more than 6,000 Chinese-Peruvian restaurants called chifas

The most beloved fusion cuisine in modern South American gastronomy was invented by the survivors of one of the more brutal indentured-labour systems of the 19th century.

Mind & Meaning

After the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the winter of 1939 expecting an easy victory in 2 weeks, the Finns held them off for 105 days in temperatures that fell below minus 40 degrees — including a single farmer-turned-sniper named Simo Häyhä who killed more than 500 Soviet soldiers in 100 days without ever using a telescopic sight

Stalin had expected to reach Helsinki in two weeks. He never reached it. The specific mechanism by which a country of approximately 3.7 million people…

Mind & Meaning

When Norway peacefully separated from Sweden in the autumn of 1905 after 91 years of union, a referendum asked the entire Norwegian male population whether they wanted independence — and 368,208 men voted yes while only 184 voted no, a margin of 99.95 percent that remains one of the most lopsided referendums in recorded history

The peaceful separation of one European country from another by referendum, in the specific autumn of 1905 during which the substantial majority of European…

Mind & Meaning

The first McDonald’s ever to open in the Soviet Union welcomed 38,000 Russians on January 31, 1990 — a queue that snaked for kilometres through the freezing centre of Moscow and lasted up to 6 hours, 22 months before the country itself would cease to exist

The first McDonald's in the Soviet Union was, by every available measure of Cold War-era symbolic significance, one of the more substantial single commercial events of the entire late-20th-century collapse of Soviet-bloc communism.