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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Psychology
The famous brass line at Greenwich where millions of tourists stand with one foot in each hemisphere is in the wrong place, because when the world switched to satellite positioning, true zero longitude quietly shifted about 100 metres east, leaving the historic Prime Meridian marker no longer at zero at all.
The world's most photographed meridian line has become a victim of its own success—and of modern satellite technology that has rendered it obsolete.
The winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon was fed rat poison, egg whites and brandy as he ran — another competitor rode 11 miles in a car, while a Cuban runner raced in street shoes and stopped to steal peaches
Bacteria living around the roots of rice plants can generate a tiny electrical current as they feed, and scientists in Bangladesh have tested the phenomenon in working paddy soil — producing electricity without reducing the rice harvest
Three New Jersey towns were jolted awake around 5 a.m. by mysterious music drifting across the Hudson — police traced it to Harlem but couldn’t identify what was actually making it
Beneath New York’s water system lies an 85-mile underground river that carries roughly half the city’s drinking water — parts of it run more than a thousand feet below ground and are so inaccessible that engineers inspect them with robotic submarines
In one Indonesian community the dead are not buried for weeks, months or even years, and are kept at home and cared for as if sleeping until the family can afford an elaborate funeral, a practice that reframes death as a slow departure rather than a single moment.
Of fifteen widely used psychological measures put through four separate validity tests, exactly one passed all four, and the field's response has been to publish more measures — the main archive now holds 73,646, over half of which have never been used a second time
Princeton seminary students were sent one at a time to another building to record a talk, some of them on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and of the five factors the experimenters tested together, the only one that predicted whether a student helped the man slumped and coughing in the alley was how much of a hurry that student had just been put in
Researchers traced Leonardo da Vinci’s family through 21 generations and found matching Y-chromosome markers in six living men — now bones from a Renaissance family tomb could connect that genetic trail directly to his time
Scientists have traced the human eye back to a tiny one-eyed ancestor that lived nearly 600 million years ago — and remnants of that ancient “cyclops” eye may still survive inside our brains as the pineal gland
Roy T. Bennett’s line from The Light in the Heart — that a life well lived is measured by how you live and love, not by what you possess — returns as a motivational post
