Writer at Space Daily

Lachlan Brown

Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space Daily's two publishers. He is the author of several books on Buddhism, mindfulness, and relationships, and oversees content operations and publishing strategy across the network. At Space Daily, Lachlan focuses on the Mind & Meaning pillar — the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes.

Profile on Brown Brothers Media →

Science

The deep cobalt Neptune everyone recognises is largely an artefact of image processing, and when researchers reprocessed the Voyager 2 data with modern calibration they found Neptune and Uranus are almost the same pale greenish blue, with Neptune only marginally darker than its supposedly boring neighbour

For most of my life, I have carried a simple colour chart of the outer Solar System in my head.

Jul 30, 2026

Science

Phobos circles Mars so quickly that it completes more than three orbits per Martian day. Because it outruns the planet’s rotation, it rises in the west and sets in the east—the only known moon whose orbit is shorter than its planet’s day

A moon that rises in the west and sets in the east has just been caught in a cosmic alignment that reveals the violent geometry of the inner solar system.

Jul 30, 2026

Science

NASA’s Mars helicopter was built to prove that flight was possible in an atmosphere one percent as thick as Earth’s, and it was expected to manage five flights over thirty days, but it flew 72 times across almost three years before a hard landing shattered its rotor blades, and it now sits where it landed, still recording the weather.

A helicopter built for five flights became Mars's longest-running aerial explorer, and even grounded, it refuses to stop working.

Jul 30, 2026

Science

Every spacecraft ever sent to operate beyond Jupiter has depended on plutonium-238—a reactor-made isotope that cannot be mined. The United States stopped producing it in 1988, then spent nearly three decades drawing down old reserves and supplementing them with material purchased from Russia. In 2015, American production finally restarted with a batch of just 50 grams.

As humanity's deepest space probes age, the nation that built them faces an unexpected crisis: it can barely manufacture the exotic fuel that keeps them alive.

Jul 30, 2026

Science

Most dinosaur fossils show bone. This one, a juvenile plant-eater from northeastern China, preserved individual skin cells inside hollow, porcupine-like spikes — a skin structure that existed for 125 million years without anyone knowing it was possible

Cellular preservation inside hollow spikes reveals skin architecture no paleontologist knew dinosaurs could evolve—and it rewrites what's possible to find in stone.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

Mercury turns exactly three times on its axis for every two orbits of the Sun, so a single day there lasts two of its years, and from the right spot on the surface you would watch the Sun rise, stop, reverse, and rise a second time.

On Mercury, the Sun rises, stops mid-sky, reverses course, and rises again—a consequence of orbital mechanics so extreme that a single day lasts nearly two years.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

Almost every sensitive radiation detector built since 1945 relies on steel salvaged from ships that sank before the first nuclear test, because everything smelted after that date carries a faint trace of the bomb era in its structure, and the supply of pre-war wrecks is finite.

A quirk of nuclear physics: the most sensitive instruments for detecting radiation depend on salvaged shipwrecks from before the atomic age, and that irreplaceable supply is running out.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

The Mediterranean dried out almost completely about 5.6 million years ago and sat as a salt desert for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Atlantic broke back through at Gibraltar and refilled the entire basin in a flood that may have taken as little as two years

When the Atlantic finally breached Gibraltar, it may have refilled an entire sea in less time than it takes to read this article.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

Cassini was deliberately flown into Saturn in September 2017 while still working perfectly, because the alternative was letting a dying spacecraft carrying Earth bacteria eventually drift into Enceladus, a moon with a liquid ocean and hydrothermal vents on its floor.

Protecting an alien ocean meant destroying humanity's most successful planetary explorer while it was still alive.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

Every atom of oxygen in the air traces back to a catastrophe: cyanobacteria started releasing it about 2.4 billion years ago, poisoned most of the life that existed at the time, and stripped enough methane from the atmosphere to freeze the planet nearly to the equator.

The air we breathe is a gift from microbial poison that nearly wiped out all life on Earth.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

The Sahara sends roughly 27 million tonnes of dust across the Atlantic every year, and the phosphorus in it is what stops the Amazon’s soils exhausting themselves, which means the largest rainforest on earth is quietly fertilised by the largest hot desert on earth.

The image is almost too neat. On one side of the Atlantic sits the Sahara, the largest hot desert on Earth.

Jul 29, 2026

Human Behaviour

The human mind has no single prime age. Raw processing speed appears to peak around 18 or 19, while short-term memory improves until about 25 and remains relatively stable for another decade. The ability to recognise other people’s emotions peaks much later, in the 40s or 50s, while vocabulary—a measure of accumulated knowledge—can keep improving into the late 60s or early 70s.

Different mental abilities peak at wildly different life stages, upending the myth of a single cognitive prime.

Jul 28, 2026

Marsdaily

A NASA instrument the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover, converted Martian air into 122 grams of breathable oxygen between 2021 and 2023 — enough to keep a small dog alive for 10 hours, and proof that astronauts could one day make the fuel to fly themselves home

For the first time, scientists proved that Mars itself can supply the oxygen astronauts will need to breathe—and to fuel their rockets home.

Jul 28, 2026

Science

The ocean produces roughly half of the oxygen humans breathe — not the Amazon, not forests — through microscopic organisms called phytoplankton that most people have never heard of

Tiny ocean drifters produce half the air you breathe, yet remain almost completely invisible to human attention or concern.

Jul 28, 2026

Science

How does a fish live eight kilometres beneath the surface, under pressure equal to a thousand cars stacked on its back, in water so cold and so heavy that the proteins in its body should long since have stopped folding?

Evolution has engineered a creature that shouldn't exist—a fish that thrives in conditions that would pulverize almost any other organism on Earth.

Jul 28, 2026

Science

Ingenuity was funded as a technology demonstration with five flights and a thirty-day window, assembled partly from mobile phone components because nothing space-rated was light enough, and it flew seventy-two times across nearly three years before a rotor tip touched the ground and permanently grounded the first aircraft to fly on another planet

A five-flight proof-of-concept built from phone parts became the first aircraft to conquer another world—until a single rotor tip ended its seventy-two-flight reign.

Jul 28, 2026