Writer at Space Daily

Mal James

Writer

Mal James is a writer at Space Daily covering self-development, productivity, relationships, and the psychology of work. He is also an entrepreneur and former teacher, and brings both perspectives into his writing on the Mind & Meaning pillar. Mal's pieces focus on the practical — how people change behavior, build better habits, and navigate the parts of life that don't come with instructions.

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Climate Science

Ethiopia answered deforestation with a single, almost unbelievable day of collective effort: in 2019 it reported planting more than 350 million tree seedlings in just one day, a claimed world record for its Green Legacy campaign against deforestation

A nation that lost nearly all its forests in a century tried to reverse course in a single afternoon, mobilizing millions of citizens in an experiment that blurred the line between environmental restoration and political spectacle.

Jul 29, 2026

Political Economy

In the early 1990s roughly half of Vietnam lived in extreme poverty; within a single generation it drove that figure to under 1 percent, one of the fastest escapes from poverty on record

The gamble that transformed a war-ravaged nation into one of history's most dramatic poverty success stories—and what it reveals about economic transformation.

Jul 29, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Around 300 million years ago, giant dragonfly-like insects hunted over ancient wetlands, and some grew wings nearly 70 centimetres across

The oxygen theory that explains giant ancient insects may have gotten the biggest part wrong.

Jul 29, 2026

Flora And Fauna

By the 1950s war had stripped South Korea’s hills bare, and few believed the forests would return: yet a decades-long national planting campaign brought them back, and today woodland covers roughly two-thirds of the whole country once again

A nation that clearcut its hills down to stubble after war chose to replant them instead, and now forests cover twice what they did seventy years ago.

Jul 29, 2026

Psychology

Standing under a huge night sky does something measurable to us, beyond a simple sense of wonder: studies find that awe shrinks the sense of self and leaves people noticeably more generous, patient and willing to help others

Awe doesn't just feel transcendent—it rewires how we treat each other, at least temporarily, and scientists are finally mapping the mechanism.

Jul 29, 2026

Human Behaviour

Before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, he made one unusual demand: that a mathematician named Katherine Johnson check the computer’s numbers by hand, saying that if she agreed they were right, he was ready to fly

In 1962, an astronaut preparing for humanity's most ambitious journey placed his faith in a Black mathematician with a pencil and paper, not the machines everyone else trusted.

Jul 29, 2026

Science

Many scientists have won a Nobel Prize, but only one person ever pulled off what Marie Curie did: she won Nobels in two different sciences, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, a feat no one has repeated in the century since

The myth of Marie Curie's brilliance obscures a darker truth: her achievement was less about transcendent talent than about the systemic barriers that made it nearly impossible for anyone to repeat.

Jul 29, 2026

Energy Daily

The electricity the world’s data centres swallow may roughly double by 2030, to a level so vast it rivals a whole industrial nation: they may draw about 945 terawatt-hours a year, close to all of Japan’s power use today

The race to power artificial intelligence threatens to overwhelm electricity grids built for a different era, forcing hard choices between innovation and energy security.

Jul 29, 2026

Human Behaviour

Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: “Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.”

We squander our scarcest resource as if we had infinite reserves of it.

Jul 28, 2026

Deep Space

In 1995 astronomers aimed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it seemed a waste of ten precious days: the picture came back swarming with about 3,000 galaxies, each a city of stars, in a speck the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.

One bold director's decision to waste Hubble's rarest resource on what looked like empty sky revealed the universe's true scale and changed astronomy forever.

Jul 28, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Every owner knows the dog head-tilt, but which dogs do it most turns out to be telling: the rare dogs ‘gifted’ at learning toy names tilted their heads far more often, hinting the tilt marks a mind hard at work

A dog's head tilt might be less adorable quirk than cognitive tell, revealing which canines are genuinely learning to think.

Jul 28, 2026

Flora And Fauna

A 2019 experiment challenged the old idea that cats are aloof and indifferent to their owners: researchers found that about two-thirds of the cats they could classify showed secure attachment patterns resembling those seen in babies with a caregiver

Science suggests your cat's indifference might be an act—two-thirds display the same attachment bonds to owners that human infants show to caregivers.

Jul 28, 2026

Technology

An MIT study found 95 percent of corporate generative AI pilots delivered no measurable return, pointing at habits over the technology

Companies are spending billions on generative AI pilots that generate nothing—not because the technology fails, but because the people deploying it do.

Jul 28, 2026

Human Behaviour

Around 2018 humanity crossed a line it had never once crossed in all its history: for the first time ever, people over 65 came to outnumber children under five, and the gap has widened every year since

The demographic inversion reshaping every society happened so quietly that most of us missed it entirely.

Jul 28, 2026

Political Economy

For years the humble American penny carried a quiet embarrassment that finally ended its long run: each one-cent coin had come to cost nearly four cents to make, and in late 2025 the US Mint struck its very last circulating penny

A coin that cost nearly four times its face value to make finally met its inevitable end, taking with it decades of economic absurdity.

Jul 28, 2026

Psychology

The more money, time, or effort we’ve poured into something failing, the harder it gets to quit, even when walking away is plainly the smart move: we throw good resources after bad just to justify what we spent

The mind's most dangerous trick is convincing you that past losses demand future sacrifice—a bias so pervasive it derails careers, relationships, and companies.

Jul 28, 2026