Mind & Meaning
July 2026
Every article published in July 2026. 860 articles · Back to full archive
Human Behaviour
KPMG ran an internal exam to certify staff on the ethical use of artificial intelligence — 28 employees were caught using artificial intelligence to cheat on it, including a partner who was fined $10,000
Aerospace
Two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the Esrange rocket range in northern Sweden has fired sounding rockets since the 1960s, and in 2028 it plans to launch Firefly's Alpha and put the first satellite into orbit from Swedish soil
Mind & Meaning
Across six studies of 1,874 people, researchers found that those who had lived abroad tended to have a clearer sense of who they were — and it was the time spent away, not the number of countries, that mattered
Science
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now thought to be 10 to 12 billion years old, meaning it was already drifting between the stars for more than twice the age of the Sun before our solar system existed.
Psychology
In a Japanese preschool, the shoes line up by themselves, the snack bowls sit on a low shelf a four-year-old can reach, and a child walks in already knowing what to do because the room, and not the adult, has quietly done the teaching
Clone Age
When a team led by Rozenn Pineau sequenced more than 500 tissue samples from across Pando, the giant Utah aspen clone, they expected the genetics to map cleanly onto geography, and instead found something quietly holding tens of thousands of years of mutation in check across a single 43-hectare body
Technology
Most of us are sure we'd spot a deepfake. We probably wouldn't: in iProov's 2025 testing only 0.1% of people correctly told real images and video from AI fakes — and they stayed about 60% confident whether they were right or wrong
Science
Most of NASA’s first Moon-base robots will depend on solar power, which makes the two-week lunar night one of the whole project’s nastiest problems — but NASA is now considering an odd workaround: sending PROMISE, a JPL engineering twin of its nuclear-powered Mars rovers, to the lunar south pole.
Mind & Meaning
Between 1978 and 2019, approximately 800 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty — accounting for roughly three-quarters of the entire world's poverty reduction during those four decades, and the fastest and largest reduction in extreme poverty ever recorded in human history according to the World Bank
Constellations
Titan is the only world besides Earth known to have rivers, lakes, seas, clouds and rain — except its “water” is methane and ethane, flowing across a surface frozen to minus 179 degrees Celsius. And in June 2026, scientists held the first Humans to Titan Summit, beginning to map what a crewed mission to Saturn’s largest moon would actually require.
Mind & Meaning
The most heavily militarized border on Earth, a hundred-and-fifty-mile strip of barbed wire and landmines cutting across the Korean Peninsula, has been sealed off from human contact for seventy years — and quietly become one of the most biodiverse wildlife refuges in Asia.
Mind & Meaning
After South Korea was forced to accept the largest IMF bailout in history in 1997, more than three and a half million ordinary citizens donated their wedding rings, family heirlooms, and Olympic gold medals to help repay the country's debt — collecting 227 tons of gold in four months
Culture
Printed at a Korean Buddhist temple in 1377, the Jikji is the world's oldest surviving book made with movable metal type — predating Gutenberg's Bible by some 78 years, though today only its second volume survives, held at the National Library of France in Paris
Human Behaviour
The longest-running study of human happiness ever conducted has been tracking the same group of Harvard students since 1938, when they were teenagers — and after nearly nine decades of interviews and medical records, the single factor most closely tied to a good life is one almost nobody would guess
Mind & Meaning