Writer at Terra Daily

Mal James

Writer

Mal James is a writer at Terra Daily covering self-development, productivity, relationships, and the psychology of work. He is also an entrepreneur and former teacher, and brings both perspectives into his writing. Mal's pieces focus on the practical — how people change behavior, build better habits, and navigate the parts of life that don't come with instructions.

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Terra Daily

A park ranger abseiling into a hidden canyon near Sydney in 1994 stumbled onto a grove that should not have existed the Wollemi pine, known only from 90-million-year-old fossils, with fewer than 100 left, in a spot Australia keeps secret

A tree thought extinct for 90 million years was hiding in plain sight, waiting for a dangling ranger to find it and upend everything we thought we knew about survival and loss.

Jul 26, 2026

Terra Daily

Between five and six million years ago o the Mediterranean nearly dried up, then the Atlantic refilled it in a flood that may have raised sea levels by more than ten metres a day

When Africa and Europe collided, the Mediterranean vanished—then the Atlantic came roaring back in a catastrophic deluge that rewrote the seafloor.

Jul 26, 2026

Terra Daily

One of the most desert-covered nations on Earth has to buy its sand from abroad, and the reason is grain-deep wind has polished Arabian sand too smooth to bind in concrete, so Saudi Arabia imports construction sand from as far as Australia

Millennia of wind have rendered Arabia's vast deserts worthless for construction—too polished and uniform to bind concrete, forcing the kingdom to import sand from halfway around the world.

Jul 26, 2026

Terra Daily

The plain cotton T-shirt in your drawer carries a hidden price tag measured not in money but in water around 2,700 litres went into making it, as much drinking water as one person gets through in two and a half years

The garment you bought for a few dollars depleted enough water to sustain a person for two and a half years, yet most of us never think twice about what went into making it.

Jul 26, 2026

Terra Daily

In a corner of Death Valley, heavy stones leave long trails across the mud, yet no one ever saw them move until time-lapse cameras caught them sliding on wafer-thin rafts of overnight ice, nudged along by the lightest breeze

For seventy years, Death Valley's wandering rocks defied explanation—until scientists discovered the answer was as delicate as it was obvious.

Jul 25, 2026

Terra Daily

Everest holds the title of highest mountain, yet it is not the peak that reaches nearest to space because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo sits farther from the planet’s core than Everest’s

The Earth's equatorial bulge makes a lesser-known Ecuadorian volcano closer to space than Everest, overturning what every atlas teaches.

Jul 25, 2026

Terra Daily

When money grew on trees: The Aztecs and Maya used cacao beans — the raw ingredient of chocolate — as everyday currency: a single tomato might cost one bean, a hen turkey around a hundred. The beans were valuable enough that people were caught counterfeiting them, moulding fakes out of dough, wax or clay and colouring them to pass as the real, chocolatey thing

Counterfeits weren't a modern invention: desperate forgers in ancient Mesoamerica sculpted fake cacao beans from dough and clay, exposing the darker side of a currency system that once made chocolate seeds more valuable than silver.

Jul 25, 2026

Terra Daily

Finland has more saunas than passenger cars: roughly 3.3 million saunas for a population of about 5.5 million people, a tradition so central that UNESCO recognises Finnish sauna culture as heritage

A ritual so fundamental that Finns built one sauna for nearly every household—and UNESCO took notice.

Jul 25, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Over its whole short life a single honeybee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey, so the honey in one jar represents the entire life’s work of hundreds of bees

What we consume in seconds required hundreds of bees to sacrifice their entire working lives.

Jul 25, 2026

Terra Daily

The Great Pyramid we see today is a stripped-down skeleton: it was once sheathed in polished white limestone that made it gleam blindingly in the sun, until the casing was quarried away over the centuries to help build medieval Cairo

For millennia, medieval Cairo's builders unknowingly dismantled one of history's greatest visual wonders, stone by stone.

Jul 25, 2026

Terra Daily

Three-toed sloths only poop about once a week, and to do it they climb all the way down from the safety of the treetops to the forest floor — one of the most dangerous things a sloth ever does — before hauling themselves back up

A creature so devoted to stillness that it risks predators and exhaustion weekly just to defecate—and scientists still can't agree why.

Jul 24, 2026

Terra Daily

Having become one of the longest-lived nations on Earth, South Korea now also has the world’s lowest birth rate, so its population is beginning to shrink even as its people live longer than almost anyone

A nation built to last centuries now faces an impossible math: more grandparents than grandchildren, and no clear way to reverse it.

Jul 24, 2026