Long Reads

Deeper reporting,
thinking made visible.

Original investigations, profile features, and longer essays from the Space Daily editorial team. Pieces published here go through additional research and review.

Science

A tongue-eating louse called Cymothoa exigua swims into a fish's gills, latches onto its tongue, drinks the blood until the tongue withers and falls off, and then spends the rest of its life acting as a functional replacement tongue the fish uses normally to eat.

In the warm coastal waters off the Gulf of California, a small crustacean about the length of a paperclip swims into the gill slit of a spotted rose snapper, crawls forward into the mouth, sinks its hooked legs into the fish's tongue, and begins to drink.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 3, 2026

Science

A single aspen grove in Utah called Pando is one organism sharing a 106-acre root system and 47,000 genetically identical trunks, weighs roughly 6,000 tons, and has been quietly cloning itself for somewhere between 9,000 and 80,000 years while every visible trunk above it lives and dies on a 130-year cycle.

In south-central Utah, beside a two-lane highway that cuts through Fishlake National Forest, stands a tree that covers 106 acres, weighs roughly 6,000 tons, and has been alive for somewhere between 9,000 and 80,000 years.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 28, 2026

Human Behaviour

Forty years and multi-tonne xenon detectors have brought dark-matter searches to the 'neutrino fog' without a signal, while a tentative hint surfaces in LIGO data built to listen for colliding black holes — and the pattern of paradigms exhausting themselves into adjacent instruments is older than physics admits

Two announcements bookend the most recent stretch of the dark-matter hunt, and the order in which they arrived matters.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

NASA's inspector general called the Space Launch System unsustainable at $4.1 billion per flight. House appropriators just added another billion above what NASA itself asked for, and forbade reallocation.

On May 13 the House Appropriations Committee approved a fiscal 2027 spending bill that did something unusual in recent memory: it rejected, comprehensively, the Trump administration's proposed cut to NASA.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 15, 2026

Constellation

JWST resolved a galaxy from 800 million years after the Big Bang while NEO Surveyor — the only NASA mission Congress has required by statute — remains roughly 30 years behind its city-killer catalog deadline, and the gap is a lesson in what makes a problem fundable inside the same agency

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have achieved remarkable results in observing ultra-faint galaxies from the early universe, detecting light that has traveled for roughly 13 billion years.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

The Artemis II crew briefed Congress in May; weeks earlier, the same agency's science directorate faced a 47% cut while human exploration was spared

Four astronauts walked into the United States Capitol carrying a small plush figure named Rise.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 14, 2026

Human Behaviour

Adults who eat the same breakfast every morning, take the same route to work, and order the same drink at every restaurant aren't boring, they may have built a small architecture of certainty in a life that taught them surprises rarely went their way

The same oat porridge at 7:15. The same left turn onto the same arterial road. The same flat white with one sugar at the café three doors down from the office.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 12, 2026

Human Behaviour

Retirement doesn't always feel like freedom, for many people it feels like being handed back a self they haven't spoken to in forty years and being told to figure out what to do with the rest of the afternoon together

Retirement is sold as a finish line, but for a lot of people it arrives more like a strange reunion.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 11, 2026

Human Behaviour

Some of the most generous people in a family can become resentful later in life when giving was treated as availability rather than choice

The most generous person in a family rarely chose the role. They were assigned it, often before they could speak in full sentences, and the assignment was so quiet that nobody, including them, ever named it out loud.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 11, 2026