There is a documented psychological shift, first described by astronauts who saw the Earth from space, called the overview effect — in which seeing the planet as a single fragile sphere with no visible borders causes a profound and often permanent change in worldview, leaving many astronauts unable to think about human conflict the same way again.

In February 1971, while travelling back from the Moon as the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, the American astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced something he later described as life-changing.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026

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Psychology

Scientists studying centenarians — people who live past 100 — have found that they don't age much more slowly than the rest of us for most of their lives, but they appear to delay the diseases that kill most other people by an average of 15 to 20 years, in a quiet pattern that suggests longevity may have less to do with slow aging and more to do with avoiding the conditions that cause it

The New England Centenarian Study at Boston University has been following people who live past 100 since 1994. It is the largest study of its kind in the world, and the longest-running.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The total number of possible chess games is so large that it exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe — by some estimates, there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in approximately a trillion trillion trillion universes like ours — and despite this near-infinite possibility space, modern chess engines can now defeat any human grandmaster who has ever lived, in any opening position they care to attempt

The American mathematician Claude Shannon, working at Bell Labs in 1949, sat down with a pencil and a sheet of paper and tried to estimate how many distinct games of chess could in principle be played.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The world's longest direct passenger flight is between New York and Singapore — a non-stop journey covering roughly 15,300 kilometers and taking about 18 hours and 50 minutes — and during that single flight, the aircraft crosses 12 time zones, burns approximately 110,000 kilograms of jet fuel, and passes over more of the Earth's surface than the entire span of the Roman Empire at its peak

Singapore Airlines Flight SQ24 departs John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York at around 9:30 in the evening, lifts off into the Atlantic, and turns north.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026

Deep Space

A teaspoon of material from a neutron star — the collapsed remnant of a massive star that has compressed all its mass into a sphere the size of a small city — would weigh approximately a billion tons on Earth, more than the combined weight of every human being currently alive, packed into a volume smaller than a sugar cube, in matter so dense that physics itself struggles to describe what it is doing

A neutron star is what remains after a massive star — somewhere between roughly seven and twenty times the mass of the Sun — runs out of nuclear fuel and collapses under its own gravity in a supernova explosion.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 2026

Mind & Meaning

If the universe is infinite — which current cosmology suggests is genuinely possible — then somewhere out there, beyond the part we can observe, there is an exact copy of the Earth, an exact copy of you, reading an exact copy of this sentence at exactly this moment, because in an infinite universe every possible arrangement of matter must occur not once, but an infinite number of times

The argument is a peer-reviewed prediction of inflationary cosmology, developed most thoroughly by the physicist Max Tegmark, then at the…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 8, 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.

Science

Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood that carries oxygen using a copper-based protein rather than iron, and because the heart that supplies the body stops beating whenever they swim, many bottom-dwelling octopuses tend to crawl along the seafloor instead of swimming for long stretches.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system. It may be older than the Sun itself, and Webb observations show it is carrying an unusually carbon dioxide-rich coma as it swings past once before leaving for interstellar space forever.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

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

Science

Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood that carries oxygen using a copper-based protein rather than iron, and because the heart that supplies the body stops beating whenever they swim, many bottom-dwelling octopuses tend to crawl along the seafloor instead of swimming for long stretches.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Aerospace

In 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear picked up a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that the astronomer on duty circled it in red ink and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin, and nearly fifty years later nobody has ever heard it again.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.

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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Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood that carries oxygen using a copper-based protein rather than iron, and because the heart that supplies the body stops beating whenever they swim, many bottom-dwelling octopuses tend to crawl along the seafloor instead of swimming for long stretches.

The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.

Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.

3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system. It may be older than the Sun itself, and Webb observations show it is carrying an unusually carbon dioxide-rich coma as it swings past once before leaving for interstellar space forever.

Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood that carries oxygen using a copper-based protein rather than iron, and because the heart that supplies the body stops beating whenever they swim, many bottom-dwelling octopuses tend to crawl along the seafloor instead of swimming for long stretches.

In 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear picked up a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that the astronomer on duty circled it in red ink and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin, and nearly fifty years later nobody has ever heard it again.

The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.

Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.

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