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.

Earth Observation

Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives less precipitation than the Sahara, yet it holds about 70 per cent of the planet’s fresh water, locked in an ice sheet averaging over two kilometres thick across the continent

Antarctica receives less precipitation than the Sahara, making it a desert by definition — yet its ice sheet, averaging over two kilometres thick, holds about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water. Here's how a place that barely snows became the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth.

Jul 13, 2026

Science

Einstein’s relativity allows time travel into the future, and we have already measured it: atomic clocks flown around Earth on aeroplanes came home showing a different time from clocks left on the ground

The first machine to carry a human-made clock measurably into the future was a scheduled passenger flight.

Jul 13, 2026

Science

A Mexican salamander that can regrow entire limbs does something stranger than healing — the axolotl reopens parts of its embryonic blueprint and uses it to rebuild what was lost

Cut the forelimb off an axolotl and it will grow another one, complete with bone, muscle, nerve and skin, in roughly six to eight weeks.

Jul 13, 2026

Solar Science

Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy inside a single photon can spend tens of thousands of years bouncing through the Sun’s dense core before it ever escapes the surface to begin that eight-minute trip

Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth from the solar surface. But the energy inside each photon spent tens of thousands of years pinballing through the Sun's core before it ever got out — a random walk through matter thirteen times denser than lead.

Jul 13, 2026

Science

Birds are not descended from dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs, a living branch of the theropod family that survived the asteroid and now fills the world with more than 10,000 species

The pigeon on the windowsill is a dinosaur. Not the descendant of one. One. This is not a rhetorical flourish.

Jul 13, 2026

Psychology

A 2012 University of Westminster study measured horror-film viewers burning about 113 calories on average, roughly a short walk, as fear and jump scares pushed their heart rates higher

Every year around late October, a number surfaces again: 113 calories, apparently the amount you burn sitting through a horror film, roughly what a short walk would cost you.

Jul 13, 2026

Space Travel

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched a metal sphere the size of a beach ball into orbit — and the panic it triggered across the country was so severe that within a year Congress poured federal money into science, maths, and foreign-language education

It was about the size of a beach ball, weighed roughly as much as a grown man, and did almost nothing.

Jul 13, 2026

Science

The trails of ants marching along your skirting board are drawn in scent, not sight — each ant lays a chemical line the next follows, and the path only fades when the food runs out and no one refreshes it

The orderly columns of ants crossing a kitchen counter are not following a plan or a leader. They are following a chemical residue laid by the ants ahead of them, refreshed with every successful trip and vanishing within hours when the food runs out.

Jul 13, 2026

Human Behaviour

Nearly every atom in your body is swapped out over the years, so in a real sense you aren’t made of the same material you were a decade ago — yet you feel like the same person

The body feels like a fixed object because consciousness rides inside it without interruption.

Jul 13, 2026

Edible

Roughly 90% of hard cheese made in the United States is now set with an enzyme grown in a vat, not pulled from a calf’s stomach

Since the FDA approved the first genetically engineered chymosin in 1990, fermentation-produced enzyme has quietly replaced calf-stomach rennet in the overwhelming majority of American hard cheese — one of the largest silent ingredient swaps in modern food history.

Jul 13, 2026

Science

A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about four billion tonnes on Earth — roughly the mass of a mountain — because the star has crushed the equivalent of the Sun into a sphere the width of a city

Neutron stars crush more mass than the Sun into a sphere the width of Manhattan, producing matter so dense a single teaspoon would weigh about four billion tonnes on Earth — the mass of a small mountain range in the volume of a sugar cube.

Jul 13, 2026

Political Economy

In 1960, South Korea was poorer per person than Ghana and depended heavily on agriculture — within one lifetime it was building the world’s most advanced ships and electronics, while exporting music and television across the planet

In 1960, South Korea was not yet the country most people picture today. It was still recovering from war, still poor, still short of capital, and still tied closely to the land.

Jul 13, 2026

Climate Science

Around 252 million years ago, volcanoes across what is now Siberia erupted repeatedly for more than a million years, releasing perhaps 100,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide and helping wipe out roughly 90 per cent of marine species in the deadliest mass extinction Earth has ever known

The end-Permian extinction was not a single volcano exploding on one bad day. It was a long volcanic province, a changing climate system, and a marine biosphere pushed past several limits at once.

Jul 13, 2026

Early Earth

A rare meteorite examined in 2026 revealed evidence of a Moon-sized world that orbited the young Sun more than 4.5 billion years ago, then vanished — possibly shattered in a catastrophic collision while Earth was still being assembled

A small stone from Northwest Africa has become evidence for a much larger absence.

Jul 13, 2026

Stellar Chemistry

Scientists examining samples returned from asteroid Bennu found ribose and glucose inside — and with phosphate and every RNA nucleobase already detected in the same asteroid material, every chemical component needed to build RNA was present in the early solar system, long before life existed on Earth.

The Bennu sample is becoming less like a single asteroid story and more like a chemistry inventory from the early solar system.

Jul 13, 2026

Human Behaviour

In 2012, researchers mapping census data across England found that communities closer to the coast reported slightly better general health, with the strongest pattern appearing in more deprived areas. Later studies found similarly modest associations with mental health, including better scores among some urban adults living within one kilometre of the sea.

The claim is easy to over-romanticise. The English coast has its postcard version: cliffs, beaches, wind, water, a horizon wide enough to make ordinary worries feel smaller.

Jul 13, 2026