Mind & Meaning
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Mind & Meaning
On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018
Mind & Meaning
Between 2002 and 2012, at least six people were killed in the Philippines while singing Frank Sinatra's 1969 song My Way at karaoke bars — a phenomenon that came to be known internationally as the My Way killings, and that prompted many Filipino karaoke bars to quietly remove the song from their playlists
Mind & Meaning
When the American national soccer team arrived in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, its 11 players were a school teacher, a hearse driver, and a Haitian dishwasher from Manhattan who had never played together and had trained together only once — and on June 29 in Belo Horizonte, they beat the mighty English team 1 to 0
Science
The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the same unexplained absorption signal on the surfaces of Pluto and Titan — two frozen worlds with very different environments but methane-and-nitrogen chemistry in common — and so far, scientists cannot match it to any confirmed molecule in the lab.
Mind & Meaning
In 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for Antarctica with 28 men and a ship called the Endurance — and 22 months later, after the ship was crushed by pack ice and the men had lived on drifting ice floes and a barren island for nearly two years, every one of them came home alive
Mind & Meaning
For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film's black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today
Mind & Meaning
During the Second World War, the American company Hormel shipped more than 100 million pounds of canned Spam to Allied soldiers on every front from the Pacific islands to the Soviet Red Army — and after the war, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that without American Spam, the Soviet Union would not have been able to feed its army
Mind & Meaning
In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right
Psychology
Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you'd expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing
Science
Scientists have now made the most comprehensive tally yet of deep-sea exploration — 43,681 dive records dating back to 1958 — and found that humans have directly seen less than 0.001% of the deep ocean floor, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island, leaving the vast seafloor across 66% of Earth’s surface essentially unobserved.
Science
A University of Washington researcher published a finding in 2025 that stops you cold: blue whales sing at frequencies so deep that killer whales, their only natural predator, cannot hear them at all — their calls are invisible to orca ears beyond one kilometre
Science
A whippet can accelerate from a standstill to 56 kilometres per hour in just a few strides — not by running harder than other dogs, but by leaving the ground twice in every single stride
Science
A 2013 study found that bottlenose dolphins could recognise the signature whistles of former companions they had not heard for more than 20 years — one of the longest social memories ever documented in a non-human animal.
Constellations
Two enormous structures — the Giant Arc and the Big Ring — appear in the same region of deep space at the same cosmic distance, a pairing so unexpected that Alexia Lopez, one of the astronomers who discovered them, says current cosmology struggles to explain even one of them, let alone both together.
Science