Writer at Space Daily

Kiran Journals

Writer

Kiran Journals is a writer at Space Daily with a degree in multimedia journalism. She covers psychology, identity, and the inner life — the questions of how people change, what holds them back, and what helps them grow. Her writing for Space Daily sits in the Mind & Meaning pillar, where she focuses on practical psychology and the human side of ambition.

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Earth News

In 2018 a female orca off the coast of Washington gave birth to a calf that died within half an hour, and rather than let the body sink she carried it with her, pushing it through the water on her head for 17 days and more than a thousand miles before finally letting go, and in 2025 the same whale did it all over again with another dead calf.

A grieving orca has now twice refused to let her dead calves sink, carrying them across vast distances in what scientists struggle to explain as anything but profound mourning.

Aug 25, 2026

Psychology

A single-celled parasite carried by cats, Toxoplasma gondii, infects an estimated third of all people on Earth, forms tiny cysts in the human brain, and in rodents famously rewires them to lose their fear of cats, and mounting research links it in humans to raised dopamine, greater risk-taking, and impulsivity.

A parasite living in your brain may be subtly reshaping your personality, making you bolder, riskier, and less cautious than you'd otherwise be.

Aug 25, 2026

Earth News

Scientists discovered that when a certain ant is wounded in the leg, its nestmates will assess the injury and, if it’s high on the limb, carefully bite the whole leg off to stop infection spreading, a deliberate amputation that dramatically raises the injured ant’s chance of survival, the only animal besides humans known to perform such surgery on each other.

When an injured ant returns home, its sisters decide whether amputation will save its life—and perform the surgery themselves.

Aug 25, 2026

Earth News

In 2008, thieves stole an entire beach in Jamaica overnight. Roughly 500 dump-truck loads of white Caribbean sand, worth around a million dollars, were dug up and hauled away from a resort site in the dark, and despite an investigation involving death threats and a helicopter chase, not a single grain was ever recovered

A million-dollar heist in plain sight—and the thieves got away with every grain.

Aug 25, 2026

Earth News

Humpback whales are interrupting orca hunts to rescue completely different species, swimming underneath a doomed seal and lifting it out of the water on their chest, or forming a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and scientists still can’t fully explain why they bother to save animals they have nothing to gain from

For years, humpback whales have been mysteriously intervening in orca hunts to save animals they'll never meet again—a pattern so bizarre that marine biologists are still searching for a plausible explanation.

Aug 24, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Thought of the day from a saying commonly attributed to Socrates: “He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.”

The satisfaction you're chasing moves further away the closer you get to it.

Aug 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

Thought of the day from philosopher Charles-Louis de Montesquieu: “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

The gap between contentment and status anxiety isn't new—but our tools for measuring ourselves against others are unprecedented.

Aug 22, 2026

Human Behaviour

Thought of the day from theologian Paul Tillich: “Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone, and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.”

The difference between loneliness and solitude isn't about being alone—it's about whether you're at peace with yourself.

Aug 21, 2026

Psychology

An octopus was filmed carrying two halves of a coconut shell across the seafloor to reassemble them later as a portable suit of armour, one of the only clear cases of a wild invertebrate using tools.

The eight-armed engineers of the ocean floor may be more clever than we thought—this one just invented mobile shelter.

Aug 20, 2026

Psychology

Astronauts, soldiers, and elite performers are all taught the same handful of body-based techniques to shut down panic in seconds, and none of them involve thinking positive thoughts.

When your nervous system is screaming, your body, not your mind, holds the key to instant calm.

Aug 18, 2026

Japan News

Japan now sells more adult nappies than baby nappies, a genuine and jarring marker of a country ageing faster than it can replace itself, and more than two Japanese people now die for every baby born, a net loss approaching a million people a year.

A nation's demographic collapse is no longer abstract—it's visible on supermarket shelves.

Aug 15, 2026

Africa News

There is a great river that flows into a desert and simply vanishes, running for around 1,600 kilometres out of the Angolan highlands before spilling into the Kalahari, fanning out into the world’s largest inland delta, and evaporating into the air without ever reaching the sea.

A river that refuses the sea, instead transforming an African desert into one of Earth's most improbable oases.

Aug 15, 2026

Physics News

For decades, movies taught us that quicksand slowly drags people under until they vanish, and it turns out that is close to impossible, and what actually traps someone is far stranger, and the one thing that saves them is the opposite of what instinct screams at you to do.

The Hollywood quicksand scene that terrified generations turns out to be almost physically impossible—and the actual danger lurking in the real thing demands the exact opposite response from what every movie taught you.

Aug 14, 2026

Technology

The Bluetooth symbol on your phone is actually a thousand-year-old Viking monogram. It belongs to a Danish king who united warring tribes, and the reason his name ended up on billions of devices was never even meant to be permanent.

A thousand-year-old Danish king's monogram became the default symbol for wireless connectivity—and nobody involved in creating it expected the name to stick around.

Aug 11, 2026

Eclipses

In 2017, a young woman glanced at a solar eclipse for only a handful of seconds, and days later doctors found the exact shape of the eclipse burned into the back of her eye. What she began drawing to describe her ruined vision matched that shape almost perfectly.

A few seconds of unprotected viewing left a permanent photographic negative on her retina—a cautionary tale written in light.

Aug 11, 2026

Technology

A tonne of old phones holds more gold than a tonne of gold ore. Each handset carries traces of gold, silver and copper, concentrated enough that recycling them, so-called urban mining, pulls more gold per tonne than an actual mine.

Our e-waste drawers contain enough precious metals to rival commercial mines—but only if we can figure out how to extract them profitably.

Aug 10, 2026