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.

Science

Within the first few months of life, every bottlenose dolphin invents a unique whistle that becomes its name for the rest of its life — and other dolphins learn that whistle, remember it, and use it to call out to that specific individual, making bottlenose dolphins the first non-human species ever discovered to use personal names

The proposition that another animal species besides humans uses personal names was, for essentially the entire history of comparative animal cognition research before the 1960s, considered a category error.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

The coldest known place in the universe is the outflow of a dying star, chilled to one degree above absolute zero — colder than the afterglow of the Big Bang

The Boomerang Nebula, a Sun-like star in its death throes about 5,000 light-years away, has cooled itself below the leftover heat of the Big Bang. The mechanism is the same one that runs your refrigerator.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

In 1868 astronomers found a new element in the Sun’s light, named it helium for the Greek word for the Sun, and no one found a trace of it on Earth for another 27 years

The gas in birthday balloons was read off the Sun before anyone proved it existed on Earth, and the claim was doubted for more than a decade.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

When a shark bites down on a hagfish, the fish floods its attacker’s mouth with slime in a fraction of a second, clogging the predator’s gills until it gags and lets go

Cameras on the deep seafloor finally caught the defense in the act, and it works almost the instant a predator commits to the bite.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

In October 2024, a team of Chinese researchers at Peking University reported that a 25-year-old woman who had lived with Type 1 diabetes since childhood stopped needing insulin injections within 75 days of receiving an experimental stem cell transplant generated from her own fat cells

A 25-year-old woman in northern China spent every day of the preceding decade injecting insulin to keep herself alive — and then, one summer afternoon in 2023…

Jun 30, 2026

Econoplex

The Stichting INGKA Foundation, which owns IKEA — every store, every meatball, every flat-pack hex key — holds roughly $60 billion in assets and was once ranked the world’s wealthiest charity, even as it gave away barely a million euros a year, making it one of the least generous foundations on earth

Stichting INGKA Foundation, the Dutch entity that owns IKEA, holds roughly $60 billion in assets and once disbursed just over a million euros a year — earning it a reputation as both the world's wealthiest charity and one of its least generous.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

The Antarctic icefish is the only vertebrate known to have no hemoglobin, its blood runs clear instead of red — and it survives on oxygen dissolved straight into a watery plasma pumped by an oversized heart

Every other animal with a backbone carries oxygen on the red pigment hemoglobin. One family of Antarctic fish lost it entirely, and the strange engineering that keeps them alive has made them one of biology's favorite natural experiments.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Two South Korean companies named Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now manufacture roughly two-thirds of the memory chips inside almost every digital device on Earth — produced inside a country whose 1953 per-capita income was lower than Somalia’s or Haiti’s

Open any device built in the past five years, look inside its memory subsystem, and the chips you find were almost certainly fabricated in one of three South…

Jun 29, 2026

Technology

In 1971, the founder of Hyundai named Chung Ju-yung walked into the London headquarters of Barclays Bank carrying a photograph of an empty Korean beach and a 500-won banknote depicting a 16th-century Korean ironclad warship — and persuaded the British lender to finance the construction of the shipyard that within just over a decade would become the largest shipbuilding operation on Earth

Chung's pitch to the British financial establishment in the autumn of 1971 was, by every reasonable measure of the available business case, absurd.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Microsoft’s experimental AI diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5% of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine — far above the 20% average achieved by 21 experienced physicians under benchmark conditions.

Microsoft's headline number is striking: in a new diagnostic benchmark, its experimental MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator, or MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5 percent of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

In the mudstones of a place called Bright Angel, Perseverance detected complex carbon molecules hundreds of times across two rocks, a find researchers called the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars

On the edge of an ancient river valley in Jezero crater, at an outcrop the mission team named Bright Angel, NASA's Perseverance rover ran its instruments…

Jun 29, 2026

Science

In July 2025, the ATLAS sky survey in Chile spotted a faint comet racing through the solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — and follow-up orbit calculations quickly showed it was not bound to the Sun at all, but had arrived from interstellar space.

On July 1, 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, reported a faint moving object to the Minor Planet Center.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Neuroscientists long believed you are born with all the neurons you will ever have — in 2025, researchers found newly formed neurons in the brains of adults as old as 78, overturning decades of settled thinking

For most of the twentieth century, the rule seemed simple. You are born with all the neurons you will ever have, and the adult brain makes no new ones.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Shown its reflection in a mirror, a small reef fish scraped at a mark it could see only there, behaving as if it recognized itself – though the researchers stopped short of calling it self-aware

When a cleaner wrasse spotted a colored mark on its own throat only by looking in a mirror, it tried to scrape the mark off, a response that meets the textbook criteria of the mirror mark test. The scientists who ran the experiment still declined to call the fish self-aware.

Jun 29, 2026

Aerospace

South Korea’s military built a solid-fuel rocket to put spy satellites in orbit on short notice, and the full four-stage version is set to make its first flight

After three test flights off Jeju Island, South Korea's Agency for Defense Development is preparing to fly the complete version of a launcher designed to send small radar satellites over North Korea whenever the military needs them.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

A 1959 programming language still quietly runs modern finance: COBOL handles ATMs, card networks, bank ledgers and government payments, with an estimated $3 trillion in commerce passing through it daily. Now, as the specialists who understand that old code retire, banks are paying premium rates just to keep it from breaking.

The strange thing about COBOL is not that it is old. Many things in finance are old.

Jun 29, 2026