Early Earth
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
An isolated indigenous tribe living deep within the Amazon rainforest speaks a language with no numbers, no color words, and no past or fictitious tenses — and their unique culture relies so strictly on immediate, firsthand experience that they have no creation myths and cannot be taught basic arithmetic.
Mind & Meaning
A survey of over one thousand adults found that vacationers were happier, but perhaps surprisingly the boost showed up mostly before the trip — in anticipation — and largely faded once they got home.
Psychology
If you feel that the world is becoming less intelligent in some way, the data from Norway, Denmark, Finland, France, Britain, and Australia agrees with you, with average IQ scores in those countries falling continuously since the mid-1990s by an estimated five to seven points per generation.
Mind & Meaning
Carl Jung suggested life splits into two halves, and the surprise is what the second is for — not more career or identity, but an inward turn he called individuation, reclaiming the parts of yourself the first half left behind
Science
Engineers trying to warn people 10,000 years from now about buried nuclear waste realised that no language could be trusted to last that long. So they imagined warnings that would not depend on words alone: fields of jagged concrete thorns, hostile earthworks and monuments designed to feel dangerous before they were understood. The message they wanted to send was almost anti-monumental: this is not a place of honour, and nothing valued is buried here.
Science
It feels obvious that heavy things fall faster than light ones, but drop a hammer and a feather where there is no air to slow them and they hit the ground at the exact same instant, the same result an astronaut proved by releasing both on the airless surface of the Moon.
Mind & Meaning
We tend to define boredom as the feeling of having nothing to do, but it might really be a failure of attention — a restless ache of wanting to engage your mind and being unable to.
Science
Everest is the highest mountain above sea level, but most of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is hidden beneath the Pacific, and measured from its base on the ocean floor to its summit it stands more than a kilometre taller than Everest, making it the tallest mountain on Earth.
Human Behaviour
By 2030, Korean women are projected to become the first population in human history with an average life expectancy above 90 years — exceeding even Japan — according to a Lancet study of 35 industrialized nations, in a demographic shift driven by improvements in cardiovascular health and near-universal healthcare access
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from novelist and essayist Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
Psychology
Thought by Carl Sagan: "All of human history happened on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
Earth News
Apple-sized rocks four kilometres below the central Pacific Ocean contain more cobalt and manganese than all known land deposits combined, and mining companies are now racing to extract them from one of the least-explored ecosystems on Earth, where over 90 per cent of the local species are still undescribed.
Mind & Meaning
After tracking how people formed new friendships, a researcher estimated the hours it quietly takes — about 50 to feel like casual friends, but more than 200 before someone becomes a close one
Earth News
In January 1995, fourteen wolves were brought from Canada in wooden crates and released into Yellowstone National Park to replace the population killed off by 1926, and the question of whether they have changed the course of the park's rivers, as popular science videos viewed by tens of millions claim, has now become one of the most contested debates in ecology.
Constellations