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

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

Mind & Meaning

The dust in your home is not just dirt — it is a mixture of skin, fabric, pollen, soil, insects, microbes, smoke, and microscopic plastic, turning an ordinary windowsill into a quiet archive of what has entered the room

Look at a windowsill after a week without cleaning and you are looking at a material document.

Jun 18, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia’s Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents

The discovery happened on a Sunday evening. On 15 February 2026, Filipp Romanov was at his laptop in his grandparents' old house in Yuzhno-Morskoy, a coastal…

Jun 18, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A 43,000-year-old stone roughly the size of a potato, found in a rock shelter in central Spain, was confirmed in 2025 to bear a single red-ochre fingerprint in its centre — placed deliberately by a Neanderthal so that the rest of the stone resembled a face — making it one of the oldest known examples of human-like abstract thinking in the prehistoric record, by a species many people still imagine as incapable of art

The story of the stone begins, like many archaeological stories, with a moment of mild astonishment at the bottom of an excavation trench.

Jun 18, 2026