Approximately 10,000 years ago, teenagers in what is now western Sweden chewed wads of birch bark pitch and spat them out, and the saliva preserved in the wads contained enough human and microbial DNA that scientists have since sequenced the chewers' complete genomes, identified the food they had eaten that day, and detected the bacterial signature of their gum disease.

The site is called Huseby Klev. It sits on the island of Orust on the western coast of Sweden, about an hour's drive north of Gothenburg.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Latest

All articles →

Mind & Meaning

We tend to view happiness as a reward for hard work and success, but a review of the evidence suggested the arrow may point the other way — happiness often comes first, then shapes work, love and health

Many of us live as though happiness is something earned. Land the job, secure the relationship, hit the income figure, fix the health problem, and contentment will follow.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Science

Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction

In May 1972, a worker at a nuclear fuel-processing plant in France ran a routine check on a batch of ore and found a number that should not have been possible.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Science

In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified.

In September 1994, a New South Wales National Parks ranger named David Noble lowered himself on a rope into a narrow sandstone gorge inside…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Human Behaviour

An email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" infected 45 million computers in 24 hours after it was released in May 2000 — disabling email systems at the Pentagon, the CIA, and most of the world's largest corporations — and the 23-year-old Filipino college dropout who wrote it now runs a phone repair booth in Manila, never prosecuted because cybercrime was not yet illegal in the Philippines

You receive an email from someone you know. The subject line reads, simply, "ILOVEYOU.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Around 40% of US teens are online 'almost constantly' — nearly double the share a decade ago — yet nearly half of them say social media is mostly bad for people their age

We are not clinicians. This article reports on survey data about teen attitudes toward social media; it is not medical or psychological advice.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

What’s up in

Mind & Meaning

The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.

Constellations

In September 2022 a NASA spacecraft deliberately crashed into a harmless asteroid 11 million kilometres away and shifted its orbit by about 32 minutes — the first time humans had ever moved another world, the moment planetary defence stopped being theory and became something we have actually done.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

Just 12.5 light years away, around a star so faint it was only discovered in 2003, sits one of the most Earth-like rocky worlds ever found in a habitable zone — and yet we still cannot answer the single question that decides everything: whether it has any atmosphere at all

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Human Behaviour

More than two-thirds of the world's people now live in countries having too few children to hold their populations steady — a quiet reversal, crossed gradually over the past two decades, that demographers say will reshape economies, cities and old age within a single lifetime.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Mind & Meaning

The longest study of human happiness ever run has followed the same men for more than 80 years — through war, careers, marriage and old age — and its director says the clearest predictor of who stayed healthy and content was not money or fame but the quality of their relationships

By Space Daily Editorial Team

What’s up in

Science

Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.

Science

Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

In 1994, a park ranger rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a living stand of trees known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed long extinct, and fewer than 100 wild Wollemi pines still exist in a grove whose coordinates the Australian government keeps classified.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Mars Daily

Breathable oxygen has now been produced on the surface of Mars — generated between 2021 and 2023 by a NASA experiment about the size of a toaster, riding inside the Perseverance rover — in the first time humans have ever made air on another planet, opening the door to bringing astronauts safely home one day

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Psychology

Urban birds in a new study let men get about a metre closer than women before flying away, and the mystery is not the distance itself but what the birds are seeing in people that people do not see in themselves

By Space Daily Editorial Team

About Space Daily

Space, science, and the human side of the frontier. Since 1995.

Space Daily is an independent publication covering three connected beats: the space industry, the science behind it, and the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Founded in Tokyo in 1995, we’ve built a thirty-year archive of rigorous reporting on the people, missions, and ideas pushing humanity outward — and on the human dynamics shaped by frontier life. The same ambitions, pressures, and patterns of mind that drive humanity to the stars also shape how we live on Earth. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

More about us →

We tend to view happiness as a reward for hard work and success, but a review of the evidence suggested the arrow may point the other way — happiness often comes first, then shapes work, love and health

Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction

Around 40% of US teens are online 'almost constantly' — nearly double the share a decade ago — yet nearly half of them say social media is mostly bad for people their age

Just 12.5 light years away, around a star so faint it was only discovered in 2003, sits one of the most Earth-like rocky worlds ever found in a habitable zone — and yet we still cannot answer the single question that decides everything: whether it has any atmosphere at all

More than two-thirds of the world's people now live in countries having too few children to hold their populations steady — a quiet reversal, crossed gradually over the past two decades, that demographers say will reshape economies, cities and old age within a single lifetime.

The longest study of human happiness ever run has followed the same men for more than 80 years — through war, careers, marriage and old age — and its director says the clearest predictor of who stayed healthy and content was not money or fame but the quality of their relationships

Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit in Gabon switched itself on as a natural nuclear reactor, running in pulses for hundreds of thousands of years as groundwater boiled away and seeped back to throttle the chain reaction

Urban birds in a new study let men get about a metre closer than women before flying away, and the mystery is not the distance itself but what the birds are seeing in people that people do not see in themselves

About Space Daily

The Space Daily Newsletter