Moon Daily
A lunar meteorite found in northwest Africa has been shown to record evidence of an…
The first few billion years of Earth's history are largely inaccessible to direct geological investigation.
Technology
Approximately 35 per cent of all purchases made on Amazon are driven by its…
The popular framing of algorithmic recommendation, repeated across most contemporary writing on consumer technology, is that personalised suggestions surface preferences the consumer already has.
Science & Engineering
Some climate models suggest Venus could once have had liquid water and habitable…
NASA GISS modelling suggests Venus may have held a shallow ocean for up to two billion years before volcanic resurfacing and a brightening Sun tipped it into a runaway greenhouse. A 2021 Nature study disputes it, arguing Venus never had oceans. Why its past is still an open question.
Science & Engineering
We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a…
AI's water footprint, from the bottle-per-email estimate to the 4.2-6.6 billion cubic metre projection for 2027. Where the water goes, why the figures are estimates with wide ranges, the difference between withdrawal and consumption, and why local concentration and disclosure matter more than the global total.
Military Space
DARPA just quietly asked industry how to rebuild a destroyed satellite fleet in…
The Pentagon's blue-sky research arm wants industry to figure out how to rebuild a shot-up satellite constellation in hours, not years.
Science & Engineering
By 2025, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White…
Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains, was dated to roughly 4,855 years old by 2025 — the oldest known non-clonal living organism. The US Forest Service keeps its exact location secret to protect it from vandals and souvenir hunters.
Science & Engineering
Beneath the streets of Naples lies a 2,400-year-old network of Greek and Roman…
Greek colonists began quarrying soft yellow tuff beneath Naples 2,400 years ago. Romans turned the voids into cisterns. In 1942, the same chambers sheltered 200,000 civilians from Allied bombing.
Human Behaviour
By the early 2030s, the United States is projected to have more adults over 65 than…
The American population pyramid is changing shape in real time, and the rate of change is accelerating.
Human Behaviour
Viktor Frankl wrote 'Man's Search for Meaning' in nine days in 1945
Viktor Frankl dictated 'Man's Search for Meaning' in nine days in the summer of 1945, weeks after his liberation from the Nazi camps that killed his wife, parents, and brother. The book, which has sold more than 16 million copies, argues that meaning is found in serving something beyond yourself — and that chasing happiness directly is the surest way to lose it.
Human Behaviour
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined 'flow' in 1975 after interviewing artists who forgot…
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow in 1975 after watching Chicago painters skip meals and lose track of time. His decades of pager studies revealed the state appears only when attention points fully outward at a task — the moment the self steps back into the frame, flow collapses.
Human Behaviour
Charles Darwin argued that the roots of human morality were not separate from…
The objection Darwin knew would be hardest to answer was not about bones or fossils.
Earth & Life
In a hunting dive, the peregrine falcon becomes the fastest animal alive, plunging…
A peregrine falcon in a hunting dive reaches a terminal velocity of about 320 km/h (200 mph), which makes it the fastest animal alive.
Space & Missions
Whoever finds the Voyager Golden Record will know exactly how long it has been…
The uranium-238 electroplated onto the Voyager record cover really is a clock a finder could read. But with a half-life of 4.51 billion years it keeps time far longer than the 'billion years' usually quoted, which describes the disc's lifespan, not the clock's. Plus the pulsar map, a second clock.
Science & Engineering
New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of…
The World Health Statistics 2026 report, published by the World Health Organization on 13 May, carries a paradox on almost every page.
Human Factors
By 2035, the global space economy is predicted to reach roughly $1.8 trillion in…
The thing that has happened to the global space economy over the past 25 years is the kind of phenomenon that is easier to see in retrospect than to recognise while it is occurring.
Science & Engineering
The blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself
The question of why the sky is blue is one of the older questions in the history of human curiosity.