Mind & Meaning
June 2026
Every article published in June 2026. 837 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
The Great Wall of China is not actually visible from space with the naked eye — astronauts from Apollo to the ISS have confirmed it — and the popular myth that it is predates space travel itself, with the best-known version coming from a 1932 Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoon
Science
A cheetah can go from a standstill to about 60 miles an hour in roughly three seconds, out-accelerating many sports cars, but it can't hold that speed for long
Constellations
Blue Origin's New Glenn exploded on its Cape Canaveral pad on May 28 — and the costliest casualty may be the lunar timeline NASA had bet on it just two days earlier
Psychology
I've been studying emotion regulation for 6 years, and I think the most practical skill you can learn is to notice your nervous system before your mind starts writing tragic fiction.
Constellations
In early June 2026, the X-59 is expected to cross Mach 1 at 43,000 feet, the first sharp proof point in NASA's fifty-year attempt to turn an overland sonic boom into a certifiable thump
Psychology
The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in whether it's conscious and the more interested I am in what happens to human consciousness around it
Climate Science
Writing a single 100-word email with ChatGPT consumes approximately the volume of a standard bottle of water, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to use the equivalent of half the United Kingdom's annual water withdrawal by 2027, and much of that water is being drawn from regions already experiencing severe drought.
Mind & Meaning
Thought of the day from French philosopher Blaise Pascal: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"
Science
A tongue-eating louse called Cymothoa exigua swims into a fish's gills, latches onto its tongue, drinks the blood until the tongue withers and falls off, and then spends the rest of its life acting as a functional replacement tongue the fish uses normally to eat.
Flora And Fauna
A sloth can take up to 30 days to digest a single leaf, the slowest recorded digestion of any mammal — its stomach stays so full that its abdominal contents can account for more than a third of its body weight, and it climbs down to relieve itself only about once a week
Human Behaviour
Neuroscientists found a region of the brain specialized for recognising faces that activates in as little as 50 milliseconds and it develops even in people who have been blind since birth
Mind & Meaning
The case for jotting down a few things we are grateful for
Constellations
The Raptor 3 was supposed to be the engine that finally ended Starship's reliability problem — instead, on its first flight, several of them quit less than 20 seconds into the boostback burn, dropping the booster into the Gulf and grounding the whole program for a federal mishap review
Spacedaily
Pluto takes about 248 Earth years to circle the Sun, which means it still hasn't completed a single orbit since we found it — and won't finish that first lap until the year 2178
Science