Apple-sized rocks four kilometres below the central Pacific Ocean contain more cobalt and manganese than all known land deposits combined, and mining companies are now racing to extract them from one of the least-explored ecosystems on Earth, where over 90 per cent of the local species are still undescribed.

The region is called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is approximately six million square kilometres of abyssal plain stretching between Mexico and Hawaii, roughly the width of the continental United States, with an average depth of around 5,000 metres.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

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Mind & Meaning

After tracking how people formed new friendships, a researcher estimated the hours it quietly takes — about 50 to feel like casual friends, but more than 200 before someone becomes a close one

More than 200 hours of hanging out, talking, and doing ordinary things together before someone starts to look less like a regular friend and more like a close one.

By Mal James · Jun 9, 2026

Earth News

In January 1995, fourteen wolves were brought from Canada in wooden crates and released into Yellowstone National Park to replace the population killed off by 1926, and the question of whether they have changed the course of the park's rivers, as popular science videos viewed by tens of millions claim, has now become one of the most contested debates in ecology.

The first eight wolves arrived through the Roosevelt Arch on the morning of 12 January 1995, in a horse trailer escorted by two park service patrol cars.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

Constellations

W2246f sits 1.2 billion light years away with an old, quiet central kiloparsec and a still-star-forming disk, but MUSE found no recent collision or active nucleus to explain the galaxy’s split personality

W2246f looks calm in exactly the place astronomers expected trouble. The spiral galaxy sits about 1.2 billion light years from Earth, spans…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026

Mind & Meaning

We tend to imagine later life feeling bleaker, but researchers tracking emotions for over two decades found the opposite pattern — negative feelings tended to fade with age while positive ones held largely steady, hinting at quiet contentment.

For a while in my late twenties and early thirties I half-believed the years ahead would mostly get heavier, with body and mood quietly sliding together and I am not alone in that forecast.

By Mal James · Jun 9, 2026

Constellations

In August 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts left a small aluminum figurine and a plaque on the Moon called the Fallen Astronaut, listing fourteen Americans and Soviets who had died in the race to get there, and they said nothing about it over the radio, revealing it only after they were safely back on Earth.

On 2 August 1971, in the dust of the Hadley-Apennine landing site, Apollo 15 commander David Scott crouched beside the Lunar Roving Vehicle…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 9, 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.

Constellations

Sunsets on Mars glow blue rather than red, because the fine dust suspended in its thin air scatters sunlight so that the blue gathers into a halo around the setting sun while the rest of the sky stays yellow and orange, leaving the planet that looks rusty all day to end it with a cool blue glow.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

The Andromeda galaxy is the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye, and the light reaching your eyes from it tonight left some 2.5 million years ago, long before our own species existed.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

Glass frogs can turn much of their body see-through while they sleep by pulling almost all of their red blood cells out of circulation and storing them in their liver, then releasing them again when they wake and need to move.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The human body gives off a faint glow of visible light, produced by ordinary chemical reactions inside living cells. It is real light, but it is far too weak to see: roughly a thousand times below the sensitivity of the naked eye, so to us the body appears completely dark.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

What’s up in

Science

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

Climate Science

The town of Mawsynram in northeastern India receives roughly 11,872 millimetres of rain a year, so much that residents weave body-length shields called knups from bamboo and banana leaf to walk hands-free through downpours that can last weeks without pause.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The smell that fills the air during the first rainfall after a dry spell is called petrichor, and it comes from plant oils, soil bacteria, and a molecule the human nose can detect at almost unbelievable concentrations

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The Pando aspen grove in Utah looks like 47,000 separate trees, but every trunk is a genetically identical clone connected by a single underground root system weighing roughly 6,000 tons, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth and at least 14,000 years old.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Mind & Meaning

The DNA in a single human cell, if stretched into a single thin line, would extend approximately 2 meters — and the total DNA in your entire body, if connected end to end, would stretch from Earth to the Sun and back roughly 245 times, all packed into cells so small that tens of thousands of them would fit on the head of a pin

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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After tracking how people formed new friendships, a researcher estimated the hours it quietly takes — about 50 to feel like casual friends, but more than 200 before someone becomes a close one

W2246f sits 1.2 billion light years away with an old, quiet central kiloparsec and a still-star-forming disk, but MUSE found no recent collision or active nucleus to explain the galaxy’s split personality

We tend to imagine later life feeling bleaker, but researchers tracking emotions for over two decades found the opposite pattern — negative feelings tended to fade with age while positive ones held largely steady, hinting at quiet contentment.

Sunsets on Mars glow blue rather than red, because the fine dust suspended in its thin air scatters sunlight so that the blue gathers into a halo around the setting sun while the rest of the sky stays yellow and orange, leaving the planet that looks rusty all day to end it with a cool blue glow.

The Andromeda galaxy is the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye, and the light reaching your eyes from it tonight left some 2.5 million years ago, long before our own species existed.

Glass frogs can turn much of their body see-through while they sleep by pulling almost all of their red blood cells out of circulation and storing them in their liver, then releasing them again when they wake and need to move.

The human body gives off a faint glow of visible light, produced by ordinary chemical reactions inside living cells. It is real light, but it is far too weak to see: roughly a thousand times below the sensitivity of the naked eye, so to us the body appears completely dark.

The town of Mawsynram in northeastern India receives roughly 11,872 millimetres of rain a year, so much that residents weave body-length shields called knups from bamboo and banana leaf to walk hands-free through downpours that can last weeks without pause.

The smell that fills the air during the first rainfall after a dry spell is called petrichor, and it comes from plant oils, soil bacteria, and a molecule the human nose can detect at almost unbelievable concentrations

The Pando aspen grove in Utah looks like 47,000 separate trees, but every trunk is a genetically identical clone connected by a single underground root system weighing roughly 6,000 tons, making it possibly the heaviest living organism on Earth and at least 14,000 years old.

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