What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
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
Atlantic waves carved a concert hall into 60-million-year-old volcanic rock off Scotland — when Mendelssohn heard the strange acoustics inside Fingal’s Cave, he went home with the opening notes of an overture already in his head
A tiny Central American country abolished its entire army in 1948 and poured the money into schools and healthcare instead, and decades later it consistently ranks among the happiest and longest-living nations on Earth.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "when one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight"
Workers renovating a centuries-old French manor broke into a wall and found 239 gold coins hidden inside — minted under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the forgotten hoard had been sitting there for generations and eventually sold for more than €1 million
A former Patagonia CEO handed her Argentine conservation land to the state with a clause attached: it stays protected for at least 99 years, and the deal created or significantly enlarged six national parks on ground she and her husband had been acquiring for conservation since the 1990s with wealth from their business careers.
In 1977, an Ohio State radio telescope called Big Ear recorded a 72-second burst of radio noise from deep space so much stronger than the background static that an astronomer circled it on the printout and wrote ‘Wow!’ in red pen, and nobody has ever detected it again despite decades of listening.
