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.

Human Behaviour

The giant stone statues of Easter Island, some weighing more than 80 tonnes and standing 10 metres tall, were moved kilometres across rough volcanic terrain by groups of 18 people pulling them upright with ropes, because the statues were specifically designed with a forward lean and a wide D-shaped base that turned every step of their transport into a controlled fall

When the first European ship arrived at Easter Island in 1722, the Dutch sailors aboard found something they could not explain.

Jun 22, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In September 1969, a 100-kilogram space rock exploded in the sky above Murchison, Australia — and 50 years later, scientists analyzing dust grains buried inside the meteorite found particles between 5 and 7 billion years old, formed in the dying outer layers of stars that lived and died long before our Sun was born, in what remains the oldest solid material ever identified on the surface of the Earth

The Murchison meteorite is, by every available measure, one of the more scientifically valuable single rocks ever to fall on the planet.

Jun 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

By the end of this century, the United States is projected to have more than one million centenarians — people aged 100 or older — for the first time in human history, in a demographic shift driven by sharply falling mortality among nonagenarians, and some demographers now believe that a majority of children born today in low-mortality countries can reasonably expect to reach their hundredth birthday

In 1950, the United States Census Bureau estimated that approximately 2,300 Americans were aged 100 or older.

Jun 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

Frances Gerety, the copywriter who coined ‘A diamond is forever’ in 1947, wrote the line judged the greatest slogan of the 20th century — yet she herself never married

In 1947, Philadelphia copywriter Frances Gerety scribbled 'A diamond is forever' on a notepad before bed. The four words rewired global marriage customs and were later named the greatest slogan of the 20th century — yet Gerety herself lived alone and never married.

Jun 20, 2026

Human Behaviour

The idea that a man should spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring was invented by De Beers marketing — in Japan the campaign set the figure at three, rewriting wedding customs where diamond engagement rings had barely existed

The two-months-salary engagement ring rule was invented by De Beers advertising, not tradition. In Japan, where diamonds were absent from weddings before 1967, the same campaign set the figure at three months and pushed adoption from under 5 percent to 77 percent within a generation.

Jun 20, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Thought of the day from Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu: “To understand others is to have knowledge; to understand oneself is to be illumined.”

The line turns on a single word, and the word is doing more work than it first appears.

Jun 20, 2026

Psychology

In 1974, psychologists found men were more likely to mistake fear for attraction after crossing a high, swaying suspension bridge

A field study on two bridges over a British Columbia canyon became one of psychology's most repeated arguments that the body can confuse a racing pulse with desire.

Jun 20, 2026

Psychology

People who assembled a plain IKEA box would pay 63 percent more for it than people handed the same box already built, an overvaluation of their own labor that researchers named the IKEA effect

Across four experiments with flat-pack boxes, origami and Lego, people priced their own clumsy handiwork as if it were nearly as good as a professional's.

Jun 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman on spacewalking: “I used to think I was scared of heights — now I know I was just scared of gravity”

The quote has a clean, precise quality that most observations about fear do not.

Jun 19, 2026

Psychology

One of the biggest factors in whether a stranger finds you attractive may not be your face, your body, or your clothing — research suggests it is whether you appear to be enjoying yourself in the moment they first see you, with a smile substantially modifying how attractive you appear in the brief seconds when first impressions form

The face you walked into the room with this morning was being read, by every person who looked at you, in approximately one hundred milliseconds — about a tenth of a second, faster than any conscious thought.

Jun 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

The face you see in the mirror every morning is not the face other people see — when researchers show people two photos of themselves, most prefer the mirror-flipped version, while their friends and partners shown the same pair consistently pick the unflipped one, meaning the face you have grown to recognize as your own is essentially the reverse of the one the world has been seeing all along

The face you saw in the mirror this morning was not the face anyone else saw when they looked at you over breakfast.

Jun 19, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Czech speleologists exploring a cave system in southern Albania in 2021 discovered the largest underground thermal lake ever found on Earth — a 138-metre-long body of warm water sitting 127 metres beneath the surface at the bottom of a 100-metre vertical abyss — large enough to fill more than three Olympic swimming pools, in complete darkness, that no human being had ever seen before

Somewhere beneath a mountain in southern Albania, in a region called Vromoner near the small town of Leskovik on the Greek border, a body of warm mineral water…

Jun 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

A brain-computer interface has, for the first time, restored fluent everyday speech to a person who had lost it — a man with ALS who had not spoken aloud in years until a small implant from the BrainGate clinical trial began translating his attempts to speak directly into computer-synthesised words, in a result researchers reported in June 2026

Casey Harrell can now talk for twelve hours at a stretch. Two years ago, he could not talk at all.

Jun 19, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Almost every encrypted secret being protected today — banking records, classified government cables — is expected to become readable within the next decade once quantum computers arrive, and intelligence agencies are already stockpiling that data, in a strategy called “harvest now, decrypt later”

Somewhere in a windowless data centre, in a country that may or may not be your own, a server is quietly storing a copy of every encrypted email you have ever…

Jun 19, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A seismic wave from Japan’s 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake travelled nearly 2,900 kilometres down to Earth’s core, bounced back to the surface 13 minutes later, and shifted the entire country eastward by roughly six millimetres at the same instant — in the first observation of its kind ever recorded

For 15 years after the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake — among the most thoroughly instrumented natural disasters in history — a small anomaly in the GPS data sat unresolved in the archives.

Jun 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street — a movie about financial fraud — was financed in part with money U.S. prosecutors say was stolen from Malaysia’s 1MDB national fund

Martin Scorsese's 2013 film about a stockbroker who defrauds investors was financed by Red Granite Pictures, a company U.S. prosecutors say used hundreds of millions of dollars looted from Malaysia's 1MDB sovereign wealth fund — one of the largest financial frauds in history.

Jun 19, 2026