Mind & Meaning
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Science
Did prehistoric humans actually live in caves?
Culture
Istanbul is the only major city on Earth that sits in two continents at once. The Bosphorus strait cuts straight through it, so one half of this metropolis of some 15 million stands in Europe and the other in Asia — meaning millions of residents cross between two continents on their daily commute, hopping from Asia to Europe and back just to get to work
Space Travel
In microgravity, the human spine lengthens by as much as five centimetres, and astronauts come home temporarily taller than when they left, before gravity compresses the column again within days of landing
Science
A female shark can reproduce with no male at all: a process called parthenogenesis, first confirmed when a captive female housed for years without males produced a pup carrying only its mother's DNA
Psychology
Researchers who study cults say the people most likely to join aren't the gullible or the unstable: they're often people in the middle of a life transition who met the group through someone they already liked
Psychology
At Kyoto University, dogs who saw a stranger snub their owner later took fewer treats from that stranger, and what's hard to shake is how closely it mirrors us: keeping careful account of who let us down while barely noting who showed up
Mind & Meaning
Trained dogs can sniff out certain cancers from a person's breath or urine, with accuracies above 90 per cent in some studies. What scientists still can't fully pin down is exactly which chemical compounds make up the scent a dog is locking onto
Psychology
At 43, a stroke left French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby conscious and lucid but almost completely paralysed, able to move only his left eyelid, so he dictated an entire memoir by blinking to choose each letter as the alphabet was read aloud to him, an estimated 200,000 blinks, one letter at a time
Flora And Fauna
Koalas are the only non-primates with true fingerprints, and theirs are so close to a human's that even under a microscope forensic experts have struggled to tell the two apart
Outer Planets
How does a moon 1.4 billion kilometres from the Sun end up with rivers, rain and lakes, but not a single drop of water in any of them?
Science
Four dead stars have been confirmed within 65 light-years of Earth, hidden for decades in the glare of the brighter red dwarfs they orbit
Science
Deep inside polar craters on Mercury, sunlight has never once fallen — and NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft confirmed in 2012 that those permanently shadowed floors hold ancient water ice, sitting metres from terrain hot enough to melt lead
Culture
The "Meditations" of the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, often quoted today as one of history's great books of wisdom, was never meant for anyone's eyes but his own — a private notebook of reminders he wrote to steady himself, with no title and no thought of readers
Science
In 1991, a single subatomic particle struck Earth carrying the kinetic energy of a fast-bowled cricket ball — tens of millions of times more than any human accelerator can give one proton — and physicists still cannot explain what launched it
Outer Planets