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

Scientists painted black cows with white stripes to test whether zebra markings deter biting flies — and the painted cows drew 50 per cent fewer flies, adding weight to the theory that zebras evolved their colouring not for camouflage or heat, but as a living insect repellent

Researchers in central Japan painted plain black cows with white stripes, stood them in a pasture, and photographed the flies that landed on them.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

Earth’s magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, the last reversal was around 780,000 years ago, and the field has been weakening for the past two centuries

Earth's magnetic field has reversed hundreds of times, last flipped around 780,000 years ago, and has weakened for two centuries. What that does, and does not, tell us.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

A supermassive black hole called RBH-1, weighing at least ten million Suns, appears to have been flung from its galaxy and is now racing through space at nearly 1,000 kilometres per second, leaving a 200,000-light-year wake of newborn stars

A thin streak of gas and young stars trailing a distant galaxy is the wake of a supermassive black hole moving at close to 1,000 kilometres per second…

Jul 10, 2026

Deep Space

Astronomers believe the Milky Way may contain billions, perhaps even trillions, of rogue planets drifting without close stars — and a 2026 study found one 9,800 light-years away that was likely born in a planetary system before being thrown into the dark

Astronomers have measured both the mass and the distance of a rogue planet for the first time.

Jul 10, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In the Viking Age town of Birka, Sweden, a warrior buried with two horses, a sword, an axe, arrows, two shields, and a full set of game pieces was assumed for nearly 140 years to be a man — DNA confirmed in 2017 that the warrior was a woman

In 1878, the Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe opened a chamber grave at Birka, the Viking Age trading town on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren, and found what looked like a textbook.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

In 1859, the Carrington solar storm sent currents surging through telegraph wires, shocking operators, igniting telegraph paper and allowing some lines to transmit with their batteries disconnected. A comparable storm today could cause widespread blackouts—and one influential worst-case assessment warned that full recovery might take four to ten years, although experts remain divided over how severe the damage would actually be.

The 1859 Carrington storm set telegraph offices sparking. A repeat could threaten modern power grids, and a much-quoted worst-case put full recovery at four to ten years, though experts disagree on the true scale.

Jul 10, 2026

Space Scopes

In July 1962, a single missing hyphen in the guidance code of NASA’s Mariner 1 probe sent it veering off course seconds after launch, forcing range safety officers to destroy a Venus mission that had cost roughly $18 million — a typo Arthur C. Clarke later called the most expensive in history.

{"content":"On July 22, 1962, at 09:21:23 UTC, an Atlas-Agena rocket lifted off Launch Complex 12 at Cape Canaveral carrying Mariner 1, the first American spacecraft ever built to reach another pla

Jul 10, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Papua New Guinea has a population of roughly 10 million people and 840 living languages — more than any other country on Earth, a number greater than all the languages spoken across every nation in Europe combined

In parts of the Papua New Guinea highlands, two villages within a day's walk of each other can speak languages as far apart as English and Japanese.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

Saturn’s rings are so young that dinosaurs would have looked up at a ringless planet, and measurements from the Cassini probe suggest they are being pulled into the planet fast enough to disappear entirely

Cassini data point two ways at once: Saturn's rings look like a recent addition, younger than most of the dinosaur era, and they are draining into the planet fast enough to vanish.

Jul 10, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Research suggests East Asian skin often shows visible wrinkling later than Caucasian skin — partly because of a thicker, collagen-rich dermis, but mostly because more melanin slows sun damage

The claim circulates in roughly this shape: skin ageing in East Asians begins about a decade later than in Caucasians, and the reason is structural, a thicker dermis packed with collagen that holds the skin firm long after it would otherwise start to give.

Jul 10, 2026

Constellations

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 followed in 2018, yet both encountered the edge of the heliosphere at almost the same distance from the Sun—121.6 and roughly 119 astronomical units—even though they crossed in different directions and during very different phases of the solar cycle, a similarity Johns Hopkins scientists said they could not yet explain.

The two Voyagers left the Sun's bubble six years apart, in different directions and at opposite ends of the solar cycle, yet found its edge at nearly the same distance. Scientists are not sure why.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

Israel’s Beresheet lander crashed into the Moon in 2019 carrying several thousand tardigrades in a dehydrated, dormant state—and although later experiments suggest they probably did not survive the impact, nobody knows whether any remain intact enough to be revived if they were ever recovered and rehydrated.

Beresheet crashed in 2019 with thousands of dormant tardigrades aboard. A later impact study suggests they probably did not survive, but the case is not closed.

Jul 10, 2026

Human Behaviour

Falling in love with a machine is no longer science fiction: about one in five American adults says they have chatted with an AI built to act as a romantic partner, and among young men it is nearly one in three

About nineteen percent of American adults, in a survey of roughly 3,000 people released in February 2025 by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, said they had chatted with an AI built to act like a romantic partner.

Jul 10, 2026

Technology

Bots have overtaken humans on one of the internet’s largest networks — for the first time, agentic AI is pushing web-page requests past the halfway line

For much of the internet's life, you could assume a person sat at the other end of most clicks.

Jul 10, 2026

Technology

The average American now spends over three hours a day on a phone, checking it nearly 200 times — roughly once every five waking minutes — a rhythm of attention no earlier generation ever knew

Most of us reach for the phone, check it, and put it down again a couple of hundred times a day.

Jul 10, 2026

Technology

A century before the first computer existed, a young Englishwoman wrote what is now called the first algorithm for a machine that was never even built — and foresaw that such engines might one day compose music, not merely crunch numbers

In 1843 someone published a step-by-step method for a machine to carry out a calculation — now widely seen as the first algorithm ever written for a machine.

Jul 9, 2026