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Solar Daily Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Solar Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Solar Daily Editorial Team produces Solar Daily's coverage of solar energy and the renewable transition. We report on photovoltaics, energy storage, project development, markets and policy, and the research advancing the next generation of solar technology. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Solar Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Solar Daily

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sep 7, 2026
Aerospace

Astronauts returning from six-month International Space Station stays land measurably taller, sometimes by up to 5 centimetres, because without gravity compressing their vertebrae the intervertebral discs slowly rehydrate and expand, and the effect reverses within a few painful weeks back on Earth

After six months on the International Space Station, astronauts return up to 5 centimetres taller because microgravity lets their intervertebral discs rehydrate and expand — and the effect reverses painfully within weeks of landing.

Sep 2, 2026
Outer Planets

On 24 August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted in Prague to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet, and the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum staff simply walked to the Exploring the Planets gallery entrance and placed a red ‘no’ symbol over the Pluto sign

On 24 August 2006, astronomers in Prague voted to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet — and within hours, Smithsonian staff walked to the Exploring the Planets gallery and stuck a red prohibition sticker over the Pluto sign, the fastest museum update in the building's history.

Sep 1, 2026
Weather Report

A cumulus cloud drifting across a summer sky can weigh roughly 500 tonnes, about the mass of 100 elephants, yet it floats because the warm air holding those water droplets aloft is still less dense than the cooler air pressing up beneath it

A typical fair-weather cumulus cloud holds around 500 tonnes of water, roughly the mass of 100 elephants. It floats because the warm, humid air suspending the droplets is fractionally less dense than the cooler air pressing up beneath it.

Aug 28, 2026
Solar Daily

When Heinrich Hertz noticed in 1887 that ultraviolet light made sparks jump more easily between charged metal plates, he called the effect puzzling, and it took 18 years and Einstein’s photon hypothesis to reveal he had accidentally observed the mechanism that would one day power satellites

In 1887 Heinrich Hertz noticed ultraviolet light made sparks jump more readily between charged plates and considered it a curiosity. Eighteen years later, Einstein's photon hypothesis revealed he had discovered the mechanism that now powers virtually every satellite in orbit.

Aug 28, 2026
Solar Daily

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

On 29 April 2020, a single lightning flash stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in 7.39 seconds — a bolt long enough to reach from London to Berlin, traced by NOAA's GOES-16 satellite from geostationary orbit.

Aug 18, 2026