What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
When corn arrived in Europe after 1492, it was hailed as a miracle crop, but eaten the wrong way it made skin crack and peel away in the sun, drove people into dementia and madness, and killed hundreds of thousands, and no one understood why for centuries.
Quote by Noam Chomsky: “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
The Golden State Killer was identified in 2018 not by a fingerprint or a witness but by a genealogy website where a distant relative had uploaded their DNA without knowing what it would eventually lead investigators to
Male Neanderthal pelvises resemble those of modern women more closely than modern men—not because women are “less evolved,” but because modern men may be the anatomical outlier. A new study argues that men evolved forward-shifted hip joints that turn the pelvis into a spring-like shock absorber for long-distance walking.
The average Japanese woman can now expect to live to roughly 87, a number that would have seemed almost impossible in 1947, when female life expectancy in Japan was just 54 — a gain that happened inside a single lifetime
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "think not so much of what you have not as of what you have, and of the things which you have, reflect how eagerly they would have been sought if you had them not"
South Korean men are projected to become the world’s longest-lived male population by 2030 — a rise researchers link not to genetics, but to better nutrition, low obesity, strong healthcare, and the quiet protection of everyday movement
Zoroastrianism, born in ancient Persia more than 2,500 years ago, developed some of the clearest early visions of a cosmic battle between good and evil, a final judgement, and a coming saviour — ideas that later echoed through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
A single-celled parasite carried by cats, Toxoplasma gondii, infects an estimated third of all people on Earth, forms tiny cysts in the human brain, and in rodents famously rewires them to lose their fear of cats, and mounting research links it in humans to raised dopamine, greater risk-taking, and impulsivity.
One unprotected gunshot can be loud enough to permanently injure the inner ear — damaging the tiny hair cells that turn vibration into sound, cells the human body cannot simply regrow
