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

A star near the centre of our galaxy reaches almost 3 per cent of the speed of light as it is whipped around something four million times the mass of the Sun that emits no light of its own — and tracking its orbit for nearly three decades helped two astronomers win a Nobel Prize

Decades of watching a star dance around an invisible cosmic anchor proved what physics predicted and earned astronomy's highest honour.

Jul 26, 2026

Science

How does the closest planet to the Sun, with a surface that hits 430 degrees at noon, hold on to billions of tonnes of ice that never melt?

The scorched planet harbors a frozen secret in the shadows of its polar craters, where ice persists in perpetual darkness while the surface beside it incinerates.

Jul 26, 2026

Science

How does a pond in Antarctica sitting at minus 50 degrees refuse to freeze, year after year, while everything around it is solid ice?

A shallow puddle of hyperconcentrated brine defies Antarctica's deep freeze, but the phenomenon is far more fragile and temporary than decades of popular science have suggested.

Jul 26, 2026

Science

Did prehistoric humans actually live in caves?

The "caveman" myth obscures a more complex reality: prehistoric humans adapted to diverse landscapes, using caves as just one of many shelters in their toolkit.

Jul 25, 2026

Outer Planets

How does a moon 1.4 billion kilometres from the Sun end up with rivers, rain and lakes, but not a single drop of water in any of them?

Titan has rain, rivers, and seas—but they're made of liquid methane, forcing us to rethink what a habitable world might actually look like.

Jul 25, 2026

Science

Deep inside polar craters on Mercury, sunlight has never once fallen — and NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft confirmed in 2012 that those permanently shadowed floors hold ancient water ice, sitting metres from terrain hot enough to melt lead

The solar system's most extreme real estate: frozen water trapped in perpetual darkness, mere metres from surface temperatures that liquify metal.

Jul 25, 2026

Science

In 1991, a single subatomic particle struck Earth carrying the kinetic energy of a fast-bowled cricket ball — tens of millions of times more than any human accelerator can give one proton — and physicists still cannot explain what launched it

A cosmic particle hit Earth with the force of a professional cricket throw—but no known physics can explain where it came from or how it got here.

Jul 25, 2026

Outer Planets

We tend to imagine the habitable zone as a narrow ring around a star, but icy moons have transformed that picture. Far beyond the reach of life-sustaining sunlight, vast oceans may remain liquid beneath their frozen surfaces—warmed by the constant gravitational flexing of the giant planets they orbit.

The most promising homes for alien life may orbit in the cosmic deep freeze, where tidal heating from giant planets keeps hidden oceans warm and potentially habitable.

Jul 25, 2026

Science

In 2025, Antarctic drillers reached bedrock and recovered ice that fell as snow 1.2 million years ago — with the air of that vanished world still sealed inside it

A time capsule of ancient air reveals how Earth's climate operated in a world before humans existed.

Jul 25, 2026

Space Scopes

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Webb is finding galaxies that look like they’ve been quietly forming stars for billions of years inside a cosmos that was, at the time of observation, only a few hundred million years old

Webb's stunning early galaxies are forcing astronomers to rethink cosmic history—but not quite in the way the headlines suggest.

Jul 25, 2026

Venusian Heat

On Venus, where the surface reaches 465 degrees Celsius and the air is sulphuric acid, scientists have proposed that microbial life could still survive — not on the ground, but drifting in the cloud layer 50 kilometres up, where temperatures and pressures are closer to a mild day on Earth

A hellish world's most hospitable zone may not be its surface but a temperate cloud layer where microbes could theoretically drift and thrive.

Jul 25, 2026

Marsdaily

As Mars’s atmosphere thinned and its surface became cold, dry and irradiated billions of years ago, any surviving microbial life may have found its last refuge underground. Yet the environments most capable of sheltering life could lie metres—or kilometres—below the surface, far deeper than any spacecraft has directly sampled.

We may be looking for Martian life in all the wrong places—and at depths we cannot yet reach.

Jul 25, 2026

Exo Life

The case for Enceladus as a potentially habitable world does not rest on speculation alone: sodium salts point to an ocean that has interacted with rock, molecular hydrogen reveals a potential chemical energy source, and phosphorus—the long-missing essential ingredient—has been detected in ice grains expelled from its ocean

Saturn's icy moon harbors the chemical ingredients for life—and evidence suggests its hidden ocean is actively mixing with rock, creating the conditions where microbial life might actually survive.

Jul 22, 2026

Mind & Meaning

I’m 37 and I watched my parents retire with everything they worked for — a paid-off house, savings, good health — and then slowly, year by year, become two people who sit in separate rooms scrolling their phones because they forgot how to be interesting to each other

I used to think the hard part of retirement was the money. My parents proved me wrong without meaning to.

May 15, 2026

Psychology

Psychology suggests self-taught people may solve problems differently from most people

There's an odd question that turns up in cognitive psychology research, not often enough to be a settled field but enough to form a pattern: could learning outside the normal path shape how you approach certain kinds of problems?

May 12, 2026

Psychology

Psychology suggests people who constantly apologize for things that aren’t their fault may not just be polite — for some, it reflects learning to manage other people’s moods

Someone bumped into me at the door. Sorry. The barista handed me the wrong drink.

May 12, 2026