The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that appear to have formed within 280 million years of the Big Bang, some containing heavy elements that shouldn't have had time to form — and at least one peer-reviewed paper has now proposed that the universe might actually be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice the standard estimate

The James Webb Space Telescope wasn't supposed to find any of this.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

Latest

Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon

Ask a shaman in the upper Amazon how his ancestors learned to combine the two specific plants that make ayahuasca work, and the answer that comes back is not the one a Western pharmacologist would offer.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Women's sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men's on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus

The claim that women possess a sharper sense of smell than men is one of those folk observations that turns out to be approximately correct, repeatedly replicated, and yet rarely explained with any mechanical honesty.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.

The pattern is a familiar one to anyone who pays attention to how the older people in their life have aged.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all

Ragini Verma, a biomedical imaging researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper in late 2013 that did something unusual…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song

When a group of Warlpiri elders stood along a dirt track between Lajamanu and Yuendumu in the Tanami Desert in 2026, staring at a patch of…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 19, 2026

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Mind & Meaning

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

Cosmology

The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that appear to have formed within 280 million years of the Big Bang, some containing heavy elements that shouldn't have had time to form — and at least one peer-reviewed paper has now proposed that the universe might actually be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice the standard estimate

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Tech Space

The Opportunity rover survived on Mars for 14 years — roughly 55 times longer than its 90-day design mission — before a 2018 global dust storm so vast it turned "day into night" across the entire planet buried its solar panels, and despite NASA sending more than 1,000 recovery commands afterward, the rover never woke up

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

A quantum flicker measured in centimeters and nanoseconds may be the hidden switch deciding whether a dying star explodes into a supernova or simply collapses in silence

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Human Behaviour

A single human exhale contains roughly 25 sextillion molecules, and the air on Earth is mixed thoroughly enough that statistically, every breath you take contains at least one molecule that was exhaled by Julius Caesar, by Cleopatra, and by every human who has ever lived

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

Roughly two billion years ago, one single-celled organism swallowed another and instead of digesting it, ended up living with it permanently inside — and the bacterium that almost became a meal became the mitochondria that now power nearly every cell in nearly every plant and animal on Earth, still carrying a small remnant of their own ancient bacterial DNA, separate from ours.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Culture

There's a version of astrology a scientist can honestly engage with — not the planetary-influence version, which has been repeatedly falsified, but the human-psychology version, which is the real reason horoscopes work, the real reason birth charts feel uncanny, and the real reason this practice has outlived nearly every empire that ever banned it

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Earth Observation

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in Europe, revealing a grim paradox: removing humans from the landscape did far more for the animals than a nuclear disaster did to harm them

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

The ozone layer is the only major environmental crisis humanity has actually solved, and it happened because the chemical industry quietly realised the replacement refrigerants were more profitable than the ones being banned

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.

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Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon

Women's sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men's on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus

The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.

Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all

Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song

A quantum flicker measured in centimeters and nanoseconds may be the hidden switch deciding whether a dying star explodes into a supernova or simply collapses in silence

A single human exhale contains roughly 25 sextillion molecules, and the air on Earth is mixed thoroughly enough that statistically, every breath you take contains at least one molecule that was exhaled by Julius Caesar, by Cleopatra, and by every human who has ever lived

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in Europe, revealing a grim paradox: removing humans from the landscape did far more for the animals than a nuclear disaster did to harm them

The ozone layer is the only major environmental crisis humanity has actually solved, and it happened because the chemical industry quietly realised the replacement refrigerants were more profitable than the ones being banned

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