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 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

In 1839, teenage Edmond Becquerel dipped two platinum electrodes into an acidic solution in his father's Paris lab and watched sunlight generate an electric current — the first observation of the photovoltaic effect, and the mechanism behind every solar panel on Earth today.

Aug 17, 2026

Psychology

The people who host every holiday, remember every anniversary, and keep the family group chat alive aren’t naturally organised, they often watched what happened in their childhood when nobody bothered, and quietly decided it wouldn’t happen again on their watch

The family member who hosts every holiday and keeps the group chat alive rarely became that person by accident. Psychology research on childhood emotional neglect and intergenerational family dynamics suggests they're often keeping a quiet promise made in childhood — that the silence they grew up in wouldn't repeat on their watch.

Aug 14, 2026

Farm News

How did a desert country with almost no rain grow tomatoes and peppers for European supermarkets while cutting freshwater use per crop by more than half over four decades?

A water-scarce region transformed itself into Europe's vegetable factory by obsessing over plumbing, not innovation headlines.

Aug 13, 2026

Carbon Worlds

Why does a Roman harbour wall submerged in salt water for 2,000 years keep growing stronger while modern concrete piers built in the same sea crumble within decades?

Roman harbour walls poured before the birth of Christ are still gaining strength in salt water while modern piers spall and rust within decades. The reason is a hot-mixed recipe of quicklime and volcanic ash that lets seawater trigger its own repair.

Aug 10, 2026

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

Perovskite solar cells self-assemble from a liquid ink at oven temperatures, coat films thinner than a wavelength of light, and — stacked on silicon — have now reached certified efficiencies above 35%, well past what any single silicon cell can achieve.

Aug 10, 2026

Water World

Why did the largest tree-planting programme ever attempted start swapping trees for grass on its driest slopes, after 10 million hectares of one fast-growing species drained the soil dry several metres down?

China planted black locust on over 10 million hectares of the Loess Plateau. It held slopes but dried the soil, and planners now plant grass and shrubs.

Aug 7, 2026

Flora And Fauna

Pando looks like 47,000 trees spread across 106 acres in Utah, but it is one quaking aspen, weighs about 6,000 tonnes, and may have been growing from the same root system for at least 12,000 years

Above Fish Lake in Utah, a single quaking aspen has been cloning itself from one root system since roughly the end of the last ice age — 47,000 trunks, 106 acres, 6,000 tonnes, one genome. Now mule deer are eating it, sucker by sucker.

Aug 6, 2026

Aerospace

In 1962 NASA’s Mariner 1 was destroyed 294 seconds after launch when a failed guidance antenna handed control to a ground program missing a single overbar, and Arthur C. Clarke turned the loss of the $18.5 million Venus probe into a phrase that never went away: the most expensive hyphen in history

On 22 July 1962, a missing hyphen in the guidance code of NASA's Mariner 1 sent the Venus-bound probe off course 293 seconds after launch, forcing a range safety officer to destroy an $18.5 million spacecraft — a punctuation error Arthur C. Clarke would later call the most expensive in history.

Aug 6, 2026

Early Earth

How did a hilltop complex in southern Anatolia get built from roughly 10-tonne limestone pillars 11,500 years ago, about 6,000 years before Stonehenge and long before pottery, metal, or the wheel?

On a limestone ridge in southeastern Türkiye, hunter-gatherers quarried 20-tonne T-shaped pillars and arranged them into circular enclosures around 11,500 years ago — six millennia before Stonehenge, using flint tools, wooden sledges, and a geometric plan that suggests specialist designers before the invention of farming.

Aug 5, 2026

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?

Mangrove soils lock away three to five times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest by burying leaf litter in oxygen-starved mud — but roughly two-thirds of restoration plantings fail within five years because seedlings go into the wrong tidal elevation, the wrong species, or the wrong ecosystem entirely.

Aug 4, 2026

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

Ivanpah's 173,500 heliostats focus desert sunlight onto three tower-top boilers hot enough to make steam without burning fuel — and now two of its three units are being switched off, more than a decade before their contracts end.

Aug 3, 2026

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?

A devastated peninsula's radical reforestation offers lessons for large-scale ecological restoration—but only if you're willing to embrace an approach that prioritizes speed and timber over pristine wilderness.

Jul 31, 2026

Solar Daily

A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 contains tiny silicon carbide grains that formed roughly 7 billion years ago, making them older than the Sun itself and the oldest solid matter ever held in a human hand

The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Victoria in 1969, contains microscopic silicon carbide grains dated to roughly 7 billion years old — older than the Sun itself and the oldest solid matter ever handled by humans.

Jul 31, 2026

Solar Daily

A boiling river runs for roughly 6.4 kilometres through the Peruvian Amazon at temperatures near 100 degrees Celsius with no volcano within 700 kilometres, heated instead by geothermal water rising along a fault the local shamans mapped centuries before geologists arrived

The Shanay-Timpishka river in the Peruvian Amazon runs for roughly 6.4 kilometres at temperatures near boiling, heated by groundwater rising through a fault. There is no volcano within 700 kilometres. Scientists now treat it as a preview of a hotter Amazon.

Jul 31, 2026

Solar Daily

How does a conifer presumed extinct for roughly 90 million years survive in a single hidden canyon fewer than 200 kilometres from a major city, with under 100 wild adults left?

Fewer than 100 wild adult Wollemi pines — a conifer whose fossil record stretches back roughly 90 million years — survive in a single secret gorge in Wollemi National Park, about 150 kilometres from Sydney. How the trees hid there, and how they've been kept alive since 1994.

Jul 31, 2026

Solar Daily

In May 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling exposed hydrated DNA fibres to X-rays for 62 hours at King’s College London, producing the photograph whose sharp cross helped reveal the double helix before Watson and Crick built their correct model

A 62-hour exposure produced the century's most consequential image—and nearly erased the woman who made it.

Jul 30, 2026