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Space Daily has been reporting since 1995. Browse the full archive below by year and month, or jump to a beat: Space, Science, Mind & Meaning.
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Visitors steal tons of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest every year, and hundreds mail pieces back with letters blaming bad luck — but returned wood can't be re-placed, so rangers stack it in a "conscience pile" that keeps growing
Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only active volcano known to erupt natrocarbonatite, the coolest lava on Earth: it flows at roughly 500–590°C, against 1,100°C or more for Hawaiian basalt. Fresh flows look black or dark brown in daylight, then react with rain and atmospheric moisture until the mountainside turns chalk-white—as though someone spilled milk over the lava.
Opportunity’s solar panels were mysteriously getting cleaner long before the rover ever saw the suspected culprit: it did not photograph its first Martian dust devil until six and a half years after landing.
In 1920, a farmer ploughing near Grootfontein in Namibia struck a buried slab of iron weighing roughly 60 tonnes. It proved to be Hoba, the largest intact meteorite ever found, and it has never been moved from where it landed—probably less than 80,000 years ago. No crater survives around it; its broad, flat shape may have slowed its descent until it struck more like a colossal dropped anvil than a cosmic projectile.
