Editorial Team

Space Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Exo Worlds

A rocky planet called TOI-561 b completes an entire year in under 11 hours and orbits so close to its star that its surface is thought to contain a vast magma ocean. Its star is roughly 10 billion years old — twice the age of the Sun — yet after billions of years of extreme radiation, James Webb found compelling evidence that the planet still has a thick atmosphere.

Four Webb secondary eclipses showed TOI-561 b is far dimmer than bare lava should be, pointing to a volatile-rich atmosphere that moves heat and may exchange gases with magma.

Aug 18, 2026

Tech Space

Two sufficiently clean metal surfaces can weld together in the vacuum of space without melting or adhesive: once their protective oxide and contamination layers are removed and the metals touch intimately, atoms across the boundary form metallic bonds as though the pieces had never been separate — a phenomenon called cold welding.

Cold welding is real, but vacuum preserves clean metal rather than automatically creating it. Motion, pressure and film removal turn the possibility into a spacecraft design hazard.

Aug 18, 2026

Culture

Under everyman’s right, anyone in Finland can walk, ski, cycle, ride, swim, angle and camp temporarily — even across privately owned countryside — provided they leave the place undisturbed

A Finnish law grants strangers the right to cross, camp, and forage on private land—a radical inversion of property rights that most countries would find unthinkable.

Aug 18, 2026

Marsdaily

On 2 July 2026, NASA’s Perseverance rover captured Earth disappearing behind Phobos from the surface of Mars — the first time in history a camera on another planet has watched our world vanish behind another object.

Perseverance recorded a one-pixel Earth passing behind Phobos from Mars, the first such observation made from the surface of another planet.

Aug 18, 2026

Water World

The water in your cup of coffee is about 125 millilitres, but the water behind it is closer to 140 litres — nearly all of it associated with growing the beans long before anyone boiled a kettle

Every cup of coffee carries an invisible water footprint stretching across continents and months—most of it consumed long before the beans reach your kitchen.

Aug 17, 2026

Space Travel

A 58-kilometre-long spacecraft called Chrysalis won an international design competition in 2025 by laying out in extraordinary detail how 2,400 people could live, reproduce and govern themselves on a 400-year voyage — long enough for generations to be born, grow old and die without ever seeing Earth or the world their descendants were travelling toward.

The competition-winning Chrysalis concept treats a generation ship as a closed society, combining fusion propulsion, rotating habitats, reproduction policy and government.

Aug 17, 2026

Science

A typical AI-focused data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes. Now companies want to put them in orbit, where carefully chosen satellites can see almost continuous sunlight and dump their waste heat into space through giant radiators instead of conventional cooling plants.

Near-continuous solar power makes orbital AI computing physically plausible, but radiators, launch mass, networking, radiation and debris decide whether it can scale.

Aug 17, 2026

Psychology

On a popular South Korean online marketplace, more strollers were sold for pets than for babies in the first three quarters of 2023 — 57 percent pet, 43 percent baby, against 33 percent pet only two years earlier

A milestone in South Korea's stroller market reveals something more complex than a simple choice between pets and parenthood.

Aug 15, 2026

Culture

Six government employees drive into a Seoul neighbourhood at night to find children who are still studying, and stop them — South Korea even paid bounties to citizens who reported the cram schools

A country desperate to kill the educational arms race it created now deploys midnight raids to drag children out of study halls.

Aug 15, 2026

Science

A meteorite punched through a bedroom ceiling in Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2024. Scientists have now found hundreds of different amino acids inside it — and the majority are not known to occur naturally on Earth.

The Hillsborough meteorite was collected within minutes of falling through a New Jersey home, giving researchers a rare look at briny asteroid chemistry and a diverse set of extraterrestrial amino acids.

Aug 15, 2026

Constellations

On 2 August 2027, the Moon’s shadow will race across Luxor’s 3,300-year-old temples and hold the Sun dark for more than six minutes — a duration no total solar eclipse will surpass again until 2114.

Luxor will receive about 6 minutes 22 seconds of totality on 2 August 2027, just one second shy of the eclipse's global maximum. No longer total solar eclipse occurs anywhere on Earth until 2114.

Aug 15, 2026

Culture

Finnish police do not simply look up a fixed speeding fine: for speeds more than 20 km/h over the limit, they calculate it from your income — roughly half your daily disposable income multiplied by a set number of days — and the biggest bills have run past 100,000 euros

A speeding ticket in Finland might cost you a few hundred euros—or your annual salary, depending on how much you earn.

Aug 15, 2026

Energy Daily

The 100,000-year plan for Finland’s and Sweden’s nuclear waste turns on something very small — whether bacteria half a kilometre underground can make enough sulphide to eat through five centimetres of copper

Two centuries of engineering innovation may ultimately depend on whether microorganisms in the bedrock can generate enough corrosive compounds to breach the copper canisters meant to contain radioactive waste for the next hundred thousand years.

Aug 15, 2026

Flora And Fauna

A study testing 458 free-ranging dogs in India found a clear preference for yellow over blue or grey — and in one test, 47 of 61 dogs approached an empty yellow bowl before a grey bowl topped with chicken

When hungry dogs bypass food for an empty bowl, it raises questions about how canine vision and instinct diverge from human assumptions.

Aug 13, 2026

Technology News

Researchers slipped a single word, ‘bread’, directly into an AI model’s own neural activations, with nothing in the prompt to hint at it, and Claude Opus still caught the change about one time in five, a signal that misfired zero times across a hundred separate trials where nothing had been planted at all.

AI systems may be developing an eerie ability to sense what's happening inside their own minds, even when humans try to hide it.

Aug 13, 2026

Human Behaviour

Despite Costa Rica having wider income inequality than the United States on the standard measure, its least advantaged citizens outlive Americans in the same position — which is the part researchers cannot fully explain

A Central American country breaks the rulebook on inequality and longevity, forcing economists to reconsider what actually keeps poor people alive.

Aug 12, 2026