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

In July 1916, sharks killed four swimmers along the coast of New Jersey, two of them in a tidal creek miles inland from the ocean — and the panic that swept across the country during those twelve days became the foundational American fear of sharks that inspired the film Jaws

Americans in 1916 did not believe sharks attacked people. The dominant scientific consensus among the marine biologists of the American Museum of Natural…

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In May 1977, so few American theater owners wanted to screen a science-fiction film called Star Wars that the studio had to bundle it with another film theaters actually wanted — and within a year, the movie no one in Hollywood expected to succeed became the highest-grossing movie in history

The most successful film franchise in the recorded history of American cinema opened in fewer theaters than essentially every other summer release of its year — and Fox had to force theaters to show it.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó, who smuggled her family’s savings inside her daughter’s teddy bear to escape communist Hungary in 1985, spent the next thirty years being demoted, defunded, and rejected for her work on messenger RNA — and her ignored research became the foundation of the COVID vaccines administered to billions of people

The teddy bear that smuggled Katalin Karikó's life savings out of communist Hungary in 1985 still exists.

Jun 30, 2026

Psychology

Neuroimaging research on jazz improvisation suggests creative flow may have less to do with inspiration and more to do with learned expertise meeting the willingness to release control

Among musicians who improvise, there is a description of a certain quality of playing that comes up often enough to constitute its own category: moments when…

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1946, a Japanese mechanic named Soichiro Honda began bolting surplus Imperial Japanese Army radio generator engines onto bicycles in post-war rationing-era Japan — and the small company he founded two years later is now the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world

In 1946, Soichiro Honda had absolutely nothing left except the idea that powering a bicycle with a leftover army engine was going to work.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A seven-member South Korean boy band named BTS has contributed close to $50 billion to South Korea’s economy across the first decade of its existence, a share of the country’s GDP comparable to that of a major Korean airline — and the small Korean entertainment label that signed them in 2013 nearly went bankrupt before their debut

Big Hit Entertainment, in 2013, was not the kind of company that produced globally dominant music acts.

Jun 30, 2026

Psychology

A Yale study found that how you think about getting older may add 7.5 years to your life, more than exercise and more than not smoking

Most people carry an unexamined expectation about ageing. It runs roughly as follows: getting older means getting worse — slower, less capable, less interesting, less relevant.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Personality tests remain among the most widely used tools in hiring and therapy despite decades of research showing limited ability to predict how a person actually behaves

Personality tests are taken by an estimated 60 to 70 per cent of job applicants in the United States who reach a certain stage in the hiring process.

Jun 30, 2026

Human Behaviour

A nationwide study of people with chronic illness found that those who prayed daily were 48% more likely to survive over the following 6 years, after controlling for depression, social support, and health behaviors

A 2023 study published in the Journal of Religion and Health followed a nationwide sample of adults living with chronic illness and found that those who prayed…

Jun 29, 2026

Psychology

Researchers stopped people to ask for directions, swapped in a different man while a door passed between them — and fewer than half noticed the person they were talking to had changed

The 1998 "door study" became the textbook demonstration of change blindness. Read in full, it is stranger and more careful than the viral version, and it says less about memory than about how little of a stranger we bother to encode.

Jun 29, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Lascaux cave paintings of southwestern France sat sealed beneath a hillside for 17,000 years before being discovered in September 1940 — when an 18-year-old French boy walking his dog watched the dog disappear down a hole left by an uprooted tree, climbed in after, and found himself surrounded by walls of painted bulls and horses

Robot the dog never received an entry in the historical record. The four teenagers who descended into the Lascaux cave on 12 September 1940 are, by every…

Jun 29, 2026

Human Behaviour

Post-it Notes were invented in 1968 by a chemist named Spencer Silver trying to develop a super-strong aerospace adhesive — and the weak glue he accidentally produced instead sat unused for six years until a colleague named Art Fry needed something to anchor the bookmarks in his church hymnal

The man who invented the adhesive that holds together approximately 50 billion office notes per year spent six years walking around the 3M corporate campus…

Jun 29, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Taj Mahal was built by an Indian emperor named Shah Jahan as a tomb for his late wife — and the project cost so much that his own son seized the throne and imprisoned him for the last eight years of his life in a fortress approximately 2.5 kilometres upstream along the same river, where his only view was the tomb itself

The story of the Taj Mahal is sometimes told as a love story, which is partly accurate; it is also a story about how the man who spent half his adult life…

Jun 29, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On November 14, 2004, a Top Gun graduate named Commander David Fravor flying off the coast of San Diego encountered a smooth white 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac candy that hovered above a churning patch of ocean — and when he tried to close on it, the object mirrored his flight path and accelerated beyond visual range in seconds

The most credible UFO encounter in modern American military history happened to a man who was, by every measurable standard, the last person in the United States Navy who should have been seeing things that were not there.

Jun 28, 2026

Psychology

Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer’s disease

Sister Mary should not, by any reasonable interpretation of late-20th-century Alzheimer's neuropathology, have been able to teach seventh and eighth grades for…

Jun 28, 2026

Psychology

In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby’s face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology

Edward Tronick — now in his eighties, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, director of its Child Development Unit, and one of the…

Jun 28, 2026