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

Chris Butler stepped out of public view a generation ago and reportedly hasn’t given a real interview in decades — the clearest photos of the reclusive Hawaii guru are now roughly 40 years old

Chris Butler, the Hawaii-born guru behind the Science of Identity Foundation and the spiritual teacher of Tulsi Gabbard's childhood, has not appeared in a verified public photograph since the mid-1980s. The clearest images of him are roughly 40 years old, and the movement built around his voice has thrived on that visual silence.

Jun 24, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Gunpowder, the substance that would eventually be used to build guns, cannons, bombs, and almost every explosive weapon humans have ever made, was invented in China sometime around the 9th century — not as a weapon at all, but accidentally, by Taoist alchemists who were searching for a chemical recipe that would give human beings an elixir of immortality

The Chinese word for gunpowder is 火藥 (huǒyào), which translates as "fire medicine.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

A reporter spent nearly a year combing through more than 25,000 pages of private documents handed over by a former campaign insider — a paper trail now reshaping how Washington views one of its rising figures

An investigative reporter spent nearly eleven months reading more than 25,000 pages of internal documents handed over by a former senior aide — a cache larger than the Pentagon Papers and now reshaping how Washington reads one of its rising political figures.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

When Gabbard entered Congress in 2013 she became the first Hindu American to serve as a US Representative, and she swore her oath on the Bhagavad Gita rather than a Bible

On January 3, 2013, Tulsi Gabbard placed her hand on a Bhagavad Gita she had carried through her Iraq deployment and was sworn in as the first Hindu American ever elected to the United States Congress.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

The tomb chamber of China’s first emperor has never been opened in the 2,200 years since his death in 210 BC — sealed beneath a 76-metre pyramid mound outside Xi’an, surrounded by 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and described by ancient texts as containing rivers of mercury that modern soil readings around the mound have now quietly confirmed

On the morning of 29 March 1974, a Chinese farmer named Yang Zhifa, working with five of his brothers and a neighbour named Wang Puzhi, was digging a well in…

Jun 24, 2026

Psychology

A battery does not store electricity in the way most people imagine — it stores chemical energy, and every time your phone turns on, it is harvesting a controlled imbalance between materials trying to trade electrons

The everyday language around batteries has settled into something convenient: we "charge" them, they "run out," we "top them up" when we can.

Jun 24, 2026

Psychology

You cannot tickle yourself, no matter how you try, because your brain predicts the touch of your own hand and cancels the sensation before you feel it

Run your own fingers across your palm and almost nothing happens. Brain scans suggest the reason sits in the cerebellum, which forecasts the feel of your own movements and quietly subtracts it.

Jun 24, 2026

Psychology

In 1898 a psychologist had children crank a fishing reel as fast as they could, first alone and then beside a rival, and about half sped up when someone was racing them — the first experiment in social psychology

Norman Triplett built a contraption out of fishing reels to test a hunch he had formed watching bicycle racers. The result became the founding experiment of social psychology, though what it actually showed was messier than the textbook version.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Patients in the late stages of Alzheimer’s who no longer recognize their own children can often still sing along, word for word, to songs they loved when they were young — because the brain regions that store musical memory are among the last the disease destroys, in one of the quietest mercies neuroscience has ever found

A patient in the late stages of Alzheimer's may not be able to identify the room she is sitting in, the year she is living in, the meal she ate twenty minutes ago, or the face of the daughter holding her hand.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has been famously interpreted by economic historians as a political allegory about American monetary policy in the 1890s — with the yellow brick road representing the gold standard and Dorothy’s silver slippers, changed to ruby in the 1939 film, representing a competing movement to back the dollar with silver

Somewhere between the cyclone and the Wicked Witch of the West, a generation of American economics students has been taught that the small girl in the silver…

Jun 23, 2026

Human Behaviour

Olive oil flavoured with oregano was recovered from clay jars sealed inside a Greek merchant ship that sank in the Aegean roughly 2,400 years ago during the lifetime of Socrates — meaning the salad dressing sitting on a table at your nearest Mediterranean uses roughly the same recipe

The Greek merchant ship that sank off the coast of Chios in approximately the fourth century BC was carrying, by the most likely reconstruction of the events…

Jun 23, 2026

Human Behaviour

When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched into orbit on May 18, 1991, he was a citizen of the Soviet Union — and when he returned to Earth 311 days later in March 1992, the country that had sent him no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had been renamed St. Petersburg, and his spacesuit still bore the letters “USSR” and the red Soviet flag he had worn while the world below him quietly stopped existing

The country that sent Sergei Krikalev into orbit on 18 May 1991 was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For 400 years, sailors crossing parts of the Indian Ocean have reported patches of sea glowing pale white from horizon to horizon, until satellite imagery finally captured the phenomenon and suggested it is likely the light of trillions of microscopic bioluminescent bacteria switching on at once

On the night of 25 January 1849, Captain Kempthorne of the ship Moozuffer recorded in his log that the Arabian Sea around him had begun to glow.

Jun 23, 2026

Psychology

A molecule called MHC I was understood for decades as the thing that lets the immune system recognize cancer, until researchers found the immune system attacks hardest exactly when cancer switches it off

Every cell in the human body carries on its surface a set of molecular flags called MHC class I molecules.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind & Meaning

By 2075, Goldman Sachs projects India will overtake the United States to become one of the world’s two largest economies — driven by India’s much younger population and continued urbanization — in what economists now describe as the largest shift in global economic power since the rise of the United States itself in the 20th century.

The shape of the global economy in 2025 looks almost nothing like the shape it had in 1995, and the shape it will have in 2050 will look almost nothing like…

Jun 23, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species’ extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Somewhere in the cold dark water below the Arctic ice, several individual Greenland sharks alive today were almost certainly already swimming when the first…

Jun 22, 2026