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

Abraham Maslow placed self-actualisation at the top of his 1943 hierarchy, but late in life he added a level above it — self-transcendence — arguing the healthiest people stop keeping score of themselves entirely

Abraham Maslow's famous 1943 pyramid ended at self-actualisation, but in the final years of his life he added a sixth tier — self-transcendence — and argued the psychologically healthiest people are the ones who have stopped auditing themselves entirely.

Jul 17, 2026

Psychology

In March 1966, Neil Armstrong completed the first docking in space, then a stuck thruster sent Gemini 8 spinning once every second — fast enough to blur the astronauts’ vision and threaten unconsciousness — forcing Armstrong to shut down the main control system and save both men with the re-entry thrusters three years before he flew to the Moon

Gemini 8 achieved the first docking in space in March 1966, then a stuck thruster spun the capsule up to a rotation a second. Armstrong shut down the main thrusters and used the re-entry system to save the crew, three years before Apollo 11.

Jul 17, 2026

Psychology

In 1982, Japan turned walking slowly through the woods into a public-health idea called forest bathing. Then it spent decades studying what forests really do to stress, the heart, and the body

Forest bathing arrives in most Western coverage wrapped in the language of ancient wisdom, as though people in Japan had been walking slowly through cedar groves for a thousand years under that name.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Antikythera mechanism, recovered from a Greek shipwreck and dated to roughly 100 BC, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that tracked the heavens, of unknown origin and mechanically unmatched for more than a thousand years

In the spring of 1902, an archaeologist at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens noticed that a corroded lump of bronze, pulled the previous year from a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, had a gear wheel set into it.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The ancient aliens theory claims extraterrestrials built the pyramids, but archaeologists have found the workers’ villages, bakeries, healed bones, graffiti, and crew names — and all the evidence points back to ordinary Egyptians

The claim is familiar enough to have its own television franchise: the pyramids of Giza were too large, too precise, and too old to have been built by human hands, so someone from elsewhere must have helped.

Jul 16, 2026

Psychology

Sugar may not make children hyperactive: across two dozen controlled trials the sugar did nothing measurable. In one small experiment, what changed was the parent — mothers who thought their sons had been given sugar rated them as more hyperactive and hovered closer.

We are writers and editors reading the research, not clinicians, paediatricians, or child psychologists.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In rural China, women created Nüshu, a script known as “women’s writing” — passed quietly from woman to woman for centuries in a society where many were never taught to read or write Chinese

He Yanxin died in October 2025, aged 86, in Jiangyong County in China's Hunan province.

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Denmark’s concept of hygge has no exact English equivalent: it describes a quality of warmth, safety, and unhurried togetherness that is often credited with some of the highest reported life-satisfaction scores measured anywhere in the world

Hygge has become one of those foreign words English-speakers reach for when their own language feels thin.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Bangladesh was once dismissed as a “basket case.” Today it is a lower-middle-income economy, transformed in large part by a garment industry that employed millions of women and, so the story goes, turned cheap clothing into a national ladder out of poverty

For half a century, a single insult has trailed Bangladesh through the development literature: the country once written off as a basket case.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The biggest club soccer matches draw audiences that dwarf most American sports finals — and only recently have U.S. investors begun treating soccer not as a niche, but as the world’s dominant sports market

On Sunday, 19 July, Spain will play Argentina in the FIFA World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the first men's World Cup final…

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Loneliness among older adults isn’t rare — surveys find nearly half of people over 60 report it, and the standard advice to join a club rarely touches the pattern underneath

Nearly half of adults over 60 report loneliness — but the standard prescription of joining a club rarely helps, because subjective loneliness and objective isolation are two different problems with two different cures.

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Good people are usually excellent at the responding half of connection — validating, listening, making others feel seen — while never offering anything vulnerable of their own, which is why they feel unknown in a room full of people who like them

The psychologist Sidney Jourard called it the disclosure paradox — people exceptional at listening and validating others often walk home feeling completely unknown, because being liked and being known are not the same experience.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The idea that you learn best as a ‘visual’ or ‘auditory’ learner is one of education’s most stubborn myths: decades of studies find that matching lessons to a supposed style makes little difference to how much we actually learn

Almost everyone can name their learning style. Ask a room of people whether they learn best by seeing, hearing, or doing, and most will answer without hesitation.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Money can buy happiness, it turns out, if you spend it on someone else: in experiments and in survey data from 136 countries, people who spent on others reported a bigger lift in mood than those who spent it on their own wants

We are writers reading the psychology literature, not clinicians or behavioural scientists.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Remember that all is opinion”

"Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest", Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in the second book of his Meditations.

Jul 16, 2026

Psychology

A Yale researcher found that people with a positive view of ageing lived roughly 7.5 years longer than those who didn’t, a figure Yale itself framed as beating exercise and not smoking

In 2002, a team led by Becca Levy at the Yale School of Public Health reported a result that has been quoted in wellness writing ever since.

Jul 16, 2026