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.

Mind & Meaning

The most heavily militarized border on Earth, a hundred-and-fifty-mile strip of barbed wire and landmines cutting across the Korean Peninsula, has been sealed off from human contact for seventy years — and quietly become one of the most biodiverse wildlife refuges in Asia.

The most heavily militarized strip of land on Earth is also, on the available scientific evidence, one of the most ecologically important.

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

After South Korea was forced to accept the largest IMF bailout in history in 1997, more than three and a half million ordinary citizens donated their wedding rings, family heirlooms, and Olympic gold medals to help repay the country’s debt — collecting 227 tons of gold in four months

Three and a half million Koreans lined up outside their banks in January 1998 to hand over their family jewelry.

Jul 1, 2026

Culture

Printed at a Korean Buddhist temple in 1377, the Jikji is the world’s oldest surviving book made with movable metal type — predating Gutenberg’s Bible by some 78 years, though today only its second volume survives, held at the National Library of France in Paris

In July 1377, in a temple on the edge of Cheongju in what is now central South Korea, a group of Buddhist followers finished printing a book using individually cast metal letters.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

The longest-running study of human happiness ever conducted has been tracking the same group of Harvard students since 1938, when they were teenagers — and after nearly nine decades of interviews and medical records, the single factor most closely tied to a good life is one almost nobody would guess

The 724 teenage boys who agreed to be studied for the rest of their lives in 1938 did not know that the single most reliable predictor of their eventual…

Jul 1, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On the last trading day of December 1989, the Japanese stock market reached a peak so high that the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo alone were reportedly worth more than the entire state of California — and the Nikkei did not return to that peak for thirty-four years

Japan was, on the evening of 29 December 1989, on the verge of taking over the world.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The unsettling possibility raised by quantum gravity is that time may not be a basic ingredient of reality. It may be something that emerges only inside the universe, from entanglement, entropy, and relationships between physical systems — while the deeper quantum structure underneath may have no ticking clock at all.

The unsettling possibility in quantum gravity is not just that our clocks might be inaccurate.

Jul 1, 2026

Climate Science

Singapore has the highest green cover of any major city on Earth at 47 per cent, achieved through a deliberate six-decade urban forestry programme that began in 1967 when the country’s founding Prime Minister decided that trees were essential infrastructure, and the country is now attempting to apply the same approach to food production, with substantially less success than the trees

Singapore is approximately 730 square kilometres in area, smaller than the city of London and substantially smaller than metropolitan New York.

Jul 1, 2026

Constellations

Scientists assumed every cave on Mars formed from ancient lava, but a team from Shenzhen University has now found eight that water carved through soluble rock — a process never before confirmed on the Red Planet

For years, the simplest explanation for Martian caves was lava. Mars has enormous volcanic provinces, long lava flows and many pit-like openings that look like skylights into lava tubes.

Jul 1, 2026

Tectonics

Around 640,000 years ago, the ground beneath Yellowstone blasted out more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock, then collapsed in on itself — carving the 45-by-85-km caldera that visitors still walk across today

Park rangers at Yellowstone field a question that catches first-time visitors off guard: where is the volcano?

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

Until June 2023, South Koreans counted age differently: a newborn was 1 at birth and everyone aged up each New Year’s Day, so a baby born December 31 turned ‘two’ the next morning, until the country standardized to international age

For most of its history, South Korea counted ages in a way that worked nothing like the system the rest of the world uses.

Jul 1, 2026

Human Behaviour

Nearly 90 percent of homes in the United States have air conditioning, and in Europe, where summers are now warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, that number is closer to 20 percent

We will state the situation plainly and let it speak for itself. According to the US Energy Information Administration, approximately 90 per cent of American households have air conditioning.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The universe appears to be expanding faster than our current model predicts — and James Webb has now strengthened the case that the discrepancy is real, not just a flaw in Hubble’s measurements.

The Hubble tension is not a disagreement about whether the universe is expanding.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

When mountain lions began appearing more often on trail cameras at a small California nature preserve, coyotes and deer shifted away from nighttime activity, and the woody plants those deer used to eat increased sixty four fold

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, known by its Ohlone name 'Ootchamin 'Ooyakma, sits about 45 miles south of San Francisco in a patch of oak woodland and grassland managed by Stanford University.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The blue whale is bigger than any dinosaur science has confirmed, and yet it is not a fossil or a record in a museum — it is a living, breathing, endangered animal that can still be seen from the California coast every summer

The blue whale is not just the largest animal alive today. By mass, it is almost certainly the largest animal science has ever confirmed, outweighing even the greatest dinosaurs known from the fossil record.

Jul 1, 2026

Technology

AI feels weightless, but it’s thirsty: UC Riverside researchers estimated training GPT-3 evaporated roughly 700,000 litres of freshwater on-site, and that 10–50 medium-length GPT-3 replies ‘drink’ about a 500ml bottle — with estimates swinging widely by location

A chatbot reply arrives as text on a screen, with nothing about it to suggest weight, heat, or water, yet the most quoted number in the debate over AI's environmental cost runs the other way.

Jul 1, 2026

Constellations

Scientists expected Pluto to be a frozen, ancient world scarred by billions of years of impacts. But when New Horizons finally arrived in 2015, it found something stranger: smooth young plains with almost no craters, signs of flowing nitrogen ice, possible ice volcanoes, and a layered blue haze in an atmosphere no one expected to look so complex

Before New Horizons reached Pluto, the safest expectation was age. At nearly 40 times Earth's distance from the Sun, Pluto seemed like the kind of world that should preserve scars.

Jun 30, 2026