Margaret Hamilton popularized the term 'software engineering' while leading nearly 100 developers on Apollo, partly to win respect for a discipline so new it was not yet a recognised field when her team's code helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon

Margaret Hamilton was 32 and running a team of nearly 100 developers at MIT when she coined the phrase 'software engineering' — half as a joke, half as a demand for respect. Six weeks later, her team's code became the first ever to run on the Moon.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 21, 2026

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Earth Observation

How did a Sahel nation facing advancing desert regrow roughly 5 million hectares of trees on farmland by changing one rule about who owns the seedlings sprouting in a farmer's field?

Over two decades, roughly 5 million hectares of Niger's degraded farmland regrew an estimated 200 million trees — not through planting, but through a change in who legally owns a sprout in a farmer's field.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 21, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Every normally sighted human eye has a blind spot about as wide as three small coins held side by side at arm's length, created where the optic nerve exits the retina and leaves no photoreceptors, and the brain quietly paints over the gap using whatever pattern surrounds it

Every human eye has a permanent blind spot where the optic nerve exits the retina, roughly the size of a small coin at arm's length. The brain hides it by painting in whatever pattern surrounds the gap — a trick so seamless it is now being used to test theories of consciousness.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 21, 2026

Earth Observation

We tend to think of the Sahara as forever draining life from Africa, but every year roughly 27.7 million tonnes of its dust cross the Atlantic on trade winds and settle on the Amazon, delivering the phosphorus the rainforest's soil cannot otherwise replace

Every year, 27.7 million tonnes of Saharan dust cross the Atlantic and settle on the Amazon, delivering roughly the same amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to its rivers. NASA's CALIPSO satellite measured the transfer — and traced most of it to a single dried lakebed in Chad.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Epidemics

Louis Pasteur was born on 27 December 1822 to a tanner in Dole, was a mediocre student who preferred drawing and fishing, and went on to establish germ theory, invent pasteurisation, and produce vaccines for anthrax and rabies

Louis Pasteur, born to a tanner in Dole on 27 December 1822 and a middling student who preferred drawing to Latin, went on to found germ theory, invent pasteurisation, and save a nine-year-old boy from rabies in 1885 — the first successful vaccination against a virus.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Earth Observation

How does a small Pacific archipelago keep rats, stoats, and possums off entire islands so that flightless birds thought nearly extinct now breed in the open again?

How drone-dropped bait, smart traps and tight biosecurity have cleared rats and stoats from Pacific islands, letting sooty terns, shearwaters and the kākāpō breed on open ground again.

By Solar Daily Editorial Team · Sep 3, 2026

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A single lightning flash on 29 April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas in 7.39 seconds, a bolt long enough to reach from London to Hamburg along a single channel of superheated plasma five times hotter than the surface of the Sun

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Daily

How does a coastal tree that grows in salt water store three to five times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest, and why do roughly two-thirds of restoration plantings still fail within five years?

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Daily

California’s Ivanpah solar farm uses 173,500 heliostats carrying nearly 350,000 mirrors to boil water atop three 140-metre towers, but regulators blocked plans to shut down two units as cheaper photovoltaic solar overtakes the technology

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Daily

How did a peninsula stripped almost bare by war and firewood cutting in the 1950s grow back to roughly two-thirds forest cover within a single lifetime, and what did its foresters do that China's larger effort could not replicate?

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

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Solar Science

Photovoltaic research, materials science, solar physics, efficiency breakthroughs, and the laboratory discoveries advancing the next generation of solar technology.

Solar Science

In 1839, a 19-year-old Edmond Becquerel dipped two platinum electrodes into an acidic solution in his father's Paris laboratory, shone sunlight on one of them, and watched a current appear on the galvanometer — the first recorded photovoltaic effect, nearly a century before anyone could explain why it worked

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Science

A perovskite solar cell can be printed from a liquid ink and processed below 150 degrees Celsius, cool enough for some plastic substrates, and the resulting film is about 100 times thinner than a human hair yet converts sunlight to electricity at efficiencies now rivalling rigid silicon cells made from crystals grown near 1,414 degrees

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Science

The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the Sun is actually white — and the yellow colour we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue light

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

Solar Science

Alfven waves drive stable electric fields that power auroras

By Solar Daily Editorial Team

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Tracking the power of the sun.

Solar Daily is an independent publication covering solar energy, photovoltaic research, storage, clean technology, and the engineering driving the transition to renewable power. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, companies, policy shifts, and technical breakthroughs shaping how solar power is produced, stored, and deployed. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows. Every published piece is reviewed and approved by a member of our team before it goes live.

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Margaret Hamilton popularized the term 'software engineering' while leading nearly 100 developers on Apollo, partly to win respect for a discipline so new it was not yet a recognised field when her team's code helped land Apollo 11 on the Moon

How did a Sahel nation facing advancing desert regrow roughly 5 million hectares of trees on farmland by changing one rule about who owns the seedlings sprouting in a farmer's field?

Every normally sighted human eye has a blind spot about as wide as three small coins held side by side at arm's length, created where the optic nerve exits the retina and leaves no photoreceptors, and the brain quietly paints over the gap using whatever pattern surrounds it

We tend to think of the Sahara as forever draining life from Africa, but every year roughly 27.7 million tonnes of its dust cross the Atlantic on trade winds and settle on the Amazon, delivering the phosphorus the rainforest's soil cannot otherwise replace

Louis Pasteur was born on 27 December 1822 to a tanner in Dole, was a mediocre student who preferred drawing and fishing, and went on to establish germ theory, invent pasteurisation, and produce vaccines for anthrax and rabies

How does a small Pacific archipelago keep rats, stoats, and possums off entire islands so that flightless birds thought nearly extinct now breed in the open again?

A single lightning flash on 29 April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas in 7.39 seconds, a bolt long enough to reach from London to Hamburg along a single channel of superheated plasma five times hotter than the surface of the Sun

How does a coastal tree that grows in salt water store three to five times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest, and why do roughly two-thirds of restoration plantings still fail within five years?

California’s Ivanpah solar farm uses 173,500 heliostats carrying nearly 350,000 mirrors to boil water atop three 140-metre towers, but regulators blocked plans to shut down two units as cheaper photovoltaic solar overtakes the technology

How did a peninsula stripped almost bare by war and firewood cutting in the 1950s grow back to roughly two-thirds forest cover within a single lifetime, and what did its foresters do that China's larger effort could not replicate?

The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the Sun is actually white — and the yellow colour we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue light

Alfven waves drive stable electric fields that power auroras

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