Editorial Team

Energy Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Energy Daily Editorial Team produces Energy Daily's coverage of the global energy industry. We report on oil and gas, power grids and utilities, energy markets and policy, and the renewables and storage reshaping how the world is powered. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Energy Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Space Travel

In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 probe to Venus veered off course and had to be destroyed 293 seconds after launch, and the postmortem traced the failure to a single missing overbar in the guidance code — one hyphen-sized mark that cost roughly $18 million in 1962 dollars.

On July 22, 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 Venus probe was destroyed 293 seconds after liftoff when a missing overbar in the guidance code caused an Atlas rocket to steer itself off course. The mark that would have prevented the failure was the width of a hyphen — and its absence cost roughly $18.5 million in 1962 dollars.

Aug 6, 2026

In 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 probe to Venus veered off course and had to be destroyed 293 seconds after launch, and the postmortem traced the failure to a single missing overbar in the guidance code — one hyphen-sized mark that cost roughly $18 million in 1962 dollars.

Titan’s atmosphere is roughly four times denser than Earth’s while its gravity is only one-seventh as strong, which means a human standing on Saturn’s largest moon could strap wings to their arms and, in principle, take off under their own muscle power

A fossil bed in North Dakota preserves fish with Chicxulub impact glass trapped in their gills, evidence they were alive as asteroid debris fell 3,000 kilometres from the crater during the first hour or two after the strike that ended the age of non-avian dinosaurs

Fraunhofer ISE achieves record 31.3% outdoor solar-to-hydrogen efficiency

How did a Central American country smaller than West Virginia go from barely one-fifth forest cover to trees covering more than half its land in a single generation?

How did a Soviet lander survive 127 minutes on the surface of a planet where the air pressure crushes submarines and the ambient heat melts lead?

How did a captured wartime rocket, fired straight up from a New Mexico desert range in 1946, return the first photograph of Earth taken from above the atmosphere?

A bowhead whale killed off Alaska in 2007 had likely carried a brass bomb-lance fragment in its shoulder since around 1890, evidence of a failed whaling strike more than a century earlier

In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling exposed a hydrated DNA fibre to X-rays for 62 hours, producing Photo 51: the pattern that helped Watson and Crick build the correct double-helix model months later

A water-harvesting jacket developed at the University of Texas can collect up to 900 millilitres a day from ambient air, but the captured moisture still has to be heated before it becomes drinkable

What happened when pastoral communities across 8,890 square kilometres changed how they lived with predators, and field attacks fell from 516 to 300 while attempted retaliatory killings dropped from 19 to 3?

How does a single tree colony in the American West cover roughly 106 acres and share one root system, making it arguably the heaviest living organism ever measured?

A single lightning flash in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, once the longest ever measured, before an older storm rewrote the record again

A tiny jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can respond to injury or starvation by reprogramming its adult body back into a polyp, restarting its life cycle with no known limit on how often the reset can happen

A tiny crustacean called Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through the gills, severs the tongue, and then attaches itself in the tongue’s place, functioning as a working replacement organ for the rest of the fish’s life

What happened when a war-flattened Asian peninsula with bare, eroding hills spent four decades planting trees and ended up roughly two-thirds covered in forest?