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

When a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev laid out the sixty-three known chemical elements on a single sheet of paper in 1869, he deliberately left blank spaces for three elements he predicted would exist but had never been observed — and within the next seventeen years, all three were discovered exactly where he had left the gaps

The most consequential prediction in the recorded history of 19th-century chemistry was made by a Russian professor working on a textbook.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Braille alphabet, read today by blind people in almost every country on Earth, was invented in 1824 by a fifteen-year-old French student who had been blind since the age of three — arranging six raised dots in a pattern small enough to sit under a single fingertip, based on a code originally developed for the French army

The most widely-used tactile writing system in human history was invented by a French teenager working on his own at night with the same kind of leather-punching awl that had blinded him when he was three years old.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

KPMG ran an internal exam to certify staff on the ethical use of artificial intelligence — 28 employees were caught using artificial intelligence to cheat on it, including a partner who was fined $10,000

KPMG Australia confirmed in February 2026 that 28 of its staff had used artificial intelligence tools to cheat on internal training exams since July 2025…

Jul 1, 2026

Psychology

In a Japanese preschool, the shoes line up by themselves, the snack bowls sit on a low shelf a four-year-old can reach, and a child walks in already knowing what to do because the room, and not the adult, has quietly done the teaching

The Japanese concept of shitsuke treats discipline as a property of the environment rather than a corrective act — the room, the routine, and the height of the shelves do the teaching that Western parenting tries to deliver through consequences.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Between 1978 and 2019, approximately 800 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty — accounting for roughly three-quarters of the entire world’s poverty reduction during those four decades, and the fastest and largest reduction in extreme poverty ever recorded in human history according to the World Bank

The single largest reduction in human poverty in the recorded history of the species happened in one country across the working career of essentially one man's political dominance.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The most heavily militarized border on Earth, a hundred-and-fifty-mile strip of barbed wire and landmines cutting across the Korean Peninsula, has been sealed off from human contact for seventy years — and quietly become one of the most biodiverse wildlife refuges in Asia.

The most heavily militarized strip of land on Earth is also, on the available scientific evidence, one of the most ecologically important.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

After South Korea was forced to accept the largest IMF bailout in history in 1997, more than three and a half million ordinary citizens donated their wedding rings, family heirlooms, and Olympic gold medals to help repay the country’s debt — collecting 227 tons of gold in four months

Three and a half million Koreans lined up outside their banks in January 1998 to hand over their family jewelry.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

The longest-running study of human happiness ever conducted has been tracking the same group of Harvard students since 1938, when they were teenagers — and after nearly nine decades of interviews and medical records, the single factor most closely tied to a good life is one almost nobody would guess

The 724 teenage boys who agreed to be studied for the rest of their lives in 1938 did not know that the single most reliable predictor of their eventual…

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On the last trading day of December 1989, the Japanese stock market reached a peak so high that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo alone were reportedly worth more than the entire state of California — and the Nikkei did not return to that peak for thirty-four years

Japan was, on the evening of 29 December 1989, on the verge of taking over the world.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

Until June 2023, South Koreans counted age differently: a newborn was 1 at birth and everyone aged up each New Year’s Day, so a baby born December 31 turned ‘two’ the next morning, until the country standardized to international age

For most of its history, South Korea counted ages in a way that worked nothing like the system the rest of the world uses.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

Nearly 90 percent of homes in the United States have air conditioning, and in Europe, where summers are now warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, that number is closer to 20 percent

We will state the situation plainly and let it speak for itself. According to the US Energy Information Administration, approximately 90 per cent of American households have air conditioning.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For more than a decade the benchmark for human heat survival has been a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius sustained for six hours — researchers have now found that deadly conditions occur well before that threshold is reached

In all six events, the paper found conditions that exceeded HEAT-Lim's non-survivable thresholds for older people in direct sun.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In August 1965, a tiny island called Singapore was forcibly expelled from Malaysia with no natural resources and a population poorer than most African nations — and within sixty years had transformed into one of the wealthiest countries on Earth

Lee Kuan Yew cried on national television. The press conference of 9 August 1965 — the most famous footage in modern Singaporean political history — preserves…

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In April 2025, the state of California officially surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world — a single American state with 40 million people generating more annual economic output than the entire country of 124 million Japanese citizens, behind only the United States, China, and Germany in the global ranking

A single American state with 40 million people generates more annual economic output than the entire country of 124 million Japanese citizens.

Jun 30, 2026

Psychology

Korean children begin learning nunchi at age three — and the ancient social-perception practice their grandmothers taught by instinct is now being studied in labs as a measurable cognitive skill

Nunchi — the Korean practice of reading a room before speaking in it — is taught to children from age three and is now being broken into measurable components by developmental researchers from England to Bhutan.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In January 2026, scientists reported that the human brain processes spoken language in a sequence that closely mirrors the layered architecture of advanced AI language models — suggesting that biological brains and artificial networks may build meaning through surprisingly similar step-by-step computations.

In January 2026, researchers reported that the order in which the human brain makes sense of spoken language, from raw sound up to meaning, lines up closely with the layer-by-layer way large language models process text.

Jun 30, 2026