Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Est. 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.

Psychology

In the late 1950s, the psychiatrist Murray Bowen moved whole families onto a hospital ward so he could watch them, and what he mapped there — the family projection process — described how a parent’s anxiety settles quietly onto one particular child and travels down three generations without a single raised voice

In 1966, psychiatrist Murray Bowen formalised the family projection process — his account of how anxiety travels across three generations through tone, attention, and silence rather than open conflict. Modern epigenetics and trauma research have started to catch up with what he saw on the wards of NIMH.

Jul 2, 2026
Mind & Meaning

In May 1980, the World Health Organization officially declared that smallpox had been eradicated from human existence — a disease that had killed approximately 300 million people in the twentieth century alone and traced back at least 3,000 years to the smallpox pustules found on the head of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V

The last person to catch smallpox naturally was a 23-year-old Somali hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin, who was diagnosed on 26 October 1977 in the town of Merca on Somalia's Indian Ocean coast.

Jul 2, 2026
Mind & Meaning

14,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a group of hunter-gatherers in Germany nursed a seriously ill puppy for weeks before it died — and when it did, they buried it in the same grave as two of their own, the oldest verified evidence of a bond between humans and dogs

The oldest verified evidence of the emotional bond between humans and dogs is the small skeleton of a puppy that would have died in a matter of days if the Ice Age hunter-gatherers who buried it had not spent approximately six weeks nursing it back to health.

Jul 2, 2026
Psychology

When a human and a dog gaze into each other’s eyes, both of them release oxytocin — the same hormone released between a human mother and her infant during nursing — and Japanese researchers reported in 2015 that this cross-species chemical feedback loop appears to be unique to dogs and their humans and does not occur in wolves

The chemical mechanism that binds a human mother to her nursing infant appears to also bind a human to their family dog — and, on the available experimental…

Jul 2, 2026
Mind & Meaning

After a Hollywood film starring Leonardo DiCaprio put an obscure Thai island beach on the global tourism map in 2000, the beach was overwhelmed by so many visitors over the next eighteen years that the Thai government closed it entirely in 2018 to let it heal — and the film studio was later ordered to help pay for the restoration

The most idyllic-looking beach in Southeast Asia was destroyed by the movie that made it famous, and then destroyed again by the tourists that the movie brought.

Jul 2, 2026
Human Behaviour

When FIFA gave the 1994 World Cup to the United States, it did so on one condition: America had to build a professional soccer league from scratch — Major League Soccer launched two years later, and the tournament itself set a total-attendance record that stood for thirty-two years until the current 2026 World Cup

FIFA's condition for giving the World Cup to a country that did not particularly want it was that America had to build itself a professional soccer league before the tournament arrived.

Jul 2, 2026
Human Behaviour

Mitophagy is the cellular housekeeping that dismantles broken mitochondria — it changes with age, and researchers now see that faltering maintenance as one of aging’s deeper biological engines

Mitophagy, the cellular process that dismantles broken mitochondria, was named by Norwegian biochemist Per Ottar Seglen in 2005. Its slow failure with age is now considered a driver of aging itself, not just a consequence — and the same pathway that fails catastrophically in early-onset Parkinson's fades gently in everyone else.

Jul 2, 2026
Psychology

Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter in late 2010 that his own children had not used the iPad, and that he limited technology at home, even as the tablet he had unveiled in San Francisco months earlier was on its way to selling hundreds of millions

In 2010, a year after unveiling the iPad in Cupertino, Steve Jobs told New York Times reporter Nick Bilton that his own children had never used one. The quote, published four years later, set the template for a Silicon Valley pattern that has held ever since.

Jul 1, 2026
Mind & Meaning

For most of the past decade, the world’s most-visited city has not been Paris, London, or New York — it has been Bangkok, which topped the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index in six of seven years through 2018 and hosted more international overnight visitors annually than any other city on Earth

The single most-visited city on Earth for the entire second half of the 2010s was not Paris, London, or New York — and most travellers who assumed it was any of the three were wrong by tens of millions of annual arrivals.

Jul 1, 2026
Mind & Meaning

In 1979, the Chinese city of Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately thirty thousand people directly across the border from Hong Kong — and within a single generation, its population has grown to over seventeen million, and it is now home to some of the largest technology companies in the world including Huawei, Tencent, and BYD

The largest and fastest urbanisation event in the recorded history of the human species happened in one Chinese city across the working career of one generation.

Jul 1, 2026