Mind & Meaning
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
People who scored higher on intelligence tests as children tend to drink more alcohol as adults in the UK and US — but not in Sweden, where the correlation runs the other way
Science
In 2031, a JAXA capsule is due to land in the Australian desert carrying more than ten grams of dust collected from Phobos. Mixed into that dust may be fragments blasted off ancient Mars—material that could preserve organic chemistry, or perhaps even traces of hypothetical Martian life from billions of years ago.
Psychology
In 1973, eight perfectly sane people had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals to see if the doctors could tell, and what happened next humiliated an entire profession and changed psychiatry forever.
Early Earth
There is a remote valley deep in the Sahara where dozens of ancient whales lie preserved in the sand exactly where they died, and the strangest part is that some of them still have tiny legs and feet
Constellations
When the FAA proposed letting commercial rocket licenses bypass specified requirements under 13 federal laws, it paired a 1984 waiver power with a Supreme Court ruling about an 88-mile Utah oil railway, carrying a regulatory argument from rail tracks to launchpads
Saturn Daily
Huygens took around 700 pictures on its way down through Titan in 2005, and we have half of them, because a single command was missing from Cassini's instructions — one of the two radio channels was never switched on, and roughly 350 images were lost
Saturn Daily
Titan turns so slowly that one rotation takes almost sixteen Earth days, and it is locked in place, showing Saturn the same face forever — so from one side of the moon the ringed planet hangs permanently in the sky, and from the other it is never seen at all
Science
A Martian day runs 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day, so rover teams at JPL live on Mars time for the length of a mission, sliding their whole schedule later each day until they are eating breakfast at midnight, and their families describe it as jet lag with no destination
Science
The International Space Station circles the planet every 92 minutes, so its crew passes through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single working day, and the only way human bodies cope is for the station to ignore all of it and run on Greenwich time with the window shades down
Saturn Daily
Titan's air is four times thicker than ours and its gravity a seventh as strong, which means a human being there could in principle fly under their own muscle power — strap on wings, run a few paces, and flap
Space Travel
At about 19 kilometres up the air pressure falls low enough that water boils at human body temperature, so an unprotected person there would feel the saliva on their tongue turn to vapour, which is why aircrew above that altitude wear sealed pressure suits rather than an oxygen mask
Human Behaviour
In 1974 in Ethiopia a team dug up a skeleton that pushed the human story back millions of years: 'Lucy,' about 3.2 million years old, showed that our ancestors walked upright long before they ever grew big brains
Science
Olympus Mons stands nearly three times the height of Everest, yet standing at its base you would not see a mountain at all, because its slopes rise so gently across roughly 600 kilometres that the summit sits well beyond the Martian horizon and the ground at your feet looks almost flat
Science
The deepest hole ever drilled into the Earth reached just over 12 kilometres before the rock at the bottom turned so hot and plastic that it flowed back into the shaft, and for two decades of effort the drill had covered about two tenths of one percent of the distance to the centre
Flora And Fauna