Psychology
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Carbon Worlds
Costa Rica reversed its forest collapse by paying landowners to keep trees standing — more than 18,000 families signed contracts funded by a national fuel tax
Science
In 1847 a Vienna doctor cut childbed-fever deaths on the doctors' ward from about one mother in ten to roughly one in eighty by making physicians wash their hands in chlorine — and the profession turned on him for it
Human Behaviour
The Eastern Jin army was outnumbered by more than five to one at the Fei River in 383 AD, yet won in a single afternoon by triggering one moment of panic in the invading force, and the result decided which civilisation would rule China for the next two centuries
Psychology
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people
Mind & Meaning
In Japan, the depth of a bow carries specific institutional meaning — a 15-degree bow is a casual greeting between colleagues, a 30-degree bow is a formal greeting to a client or customer, and a 45-degree bow is reserved for serious apology, gratitude, or the greeting of someone whose social standing significantly exceeds your own
Mind & Meaning
The Toto company introduced the Washlet toilet in Japan in 1980 — a heated toilet seat with a built-in warm-water bidet, an air dryer, a deodorizer, and a control panel of buttons — and by 2026 roughly 80 percent of Japanese households have one, making Japan the only country on earth where the toilet is a piece of consumer electronics
Space Scopes
A probe called Cassini spent thirteen years orbiting Saturn, flew through the plumes of its moon Enceladus, tasted water and organic molecules in the spray, and then was deliberately crashed into Saturn's atmosphere in 2017 so it could not contaminate what might be a living ocean
Mind & Meaning
To read a newspaper in Japan, a person needs to know three completely different writing systems used simultaneously — hiragana for native Japanese words, katakana for foreign loan-words, and kanji for concepts borrowed from Chinese roughly 1,500 years ago — plus romaji, the Latin alphabet Japanese schoolchildren learn to type their language into computers and phones
Science
The Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of all the mass in the entire solar system — meaning that if you took all eight planets, every one of their moons, every asteroid, and every comet, and combined them into a single object, that object would weigh less than one seven-hundredth of the Sun
Mind & Meaning
On the morning of December 26, 2004, a 10-year-old British girl named Tilly Smith was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand when she noticed the sea frothing and receding exactly as her geography teacher had taught her two weeks earlier — and her warning saved roughly 100 lives that morning
Mind & Meaning
In 2014, a neuroscientist named Gregory Berns trained a group of dogs to lie completely still inside a functional MRI scanner and measured what happened in their brains when they smelled their owners — and the reward centers of the dogs' brains lit up more brightly for their owners than for any other scent, including the scent of other dogs in their own households
Space Scopes
NASA strapped a helmet called the Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector around astronauts' heads in the dark, and every time a crewman called out a flash, the plates had caught a particle crossing straight through his skull
Mind & Meaning
For almost 15 years, a retired psychology professor worked with his Border Collie Chaser for four to five hours a day — and by the time he stopped adding new toys because his house had run out of room, Chaser could correctly identify 1,022 different toys by their individual names
Deep Space
The Parker Solar Probe, launched by NASA in 2018, has flown closer to the Sun than any human-made object in history — traveling at more than 430,000 miles per hour with a heat shield that reaches 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, while the instruments behind it stay at room temperature, protected by four and a half inches of carbon foam
Space Medicine