What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
We move through the day convinced everyone notices our flaws, but when psychologists made students walk into a crowded room wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, the wearers guessed nearly half the room would remember the face on the shirt, and barely a quarter actually did.
The kind of sentence that means nothing until the day it suddenly means everything: "Maybe the moon is only beautiful because it is so far away."
Across two 16-week experiments, researchers tested whether people can deliberately reshape their personality, and found that those who set a goal to change a Big Five trait measurably did
A cave in the Pyrenees at 7,330 feet above sea level contained 23 ancient fireplaces, traces of a child, and green stones that prehistoric people appear to have been climbing up there to process as copper ore for over 4,000 years
The FDA has added a new active ingredient to over-the-counter sunscreens for the first time in 20 years, and the reason bemotrizinol matters is not just regulation — it absorbs both UVA and UVB rays, offering U.S. formulas a tool many countries have had for years
The longest-lived people on Earth do not run marathons, lift weights, or follow structured exercise plans — instead, they live in places where physical movement is built into daily life through walking, gardening, and the simple geography of hilly terrain — meaning the most effective anti-aging routine ever identified by researchers may be one that doesn't feel like a routine at all
PFAS were added to pizza boxes for decades because of a carbon-fluorine bond nothing in nature can break and Maine just became the first US state to enforce a ban on putting them there
Thought of the day from Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne: "He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."
The United States is projected to collapse near the absolute bottom of the developed world for life expectancy by 2030—falling behind even Croatia and Mexico—according to an ensemble of 21 probabilistic forecasting models that point to high rates of chronic disease and unequal healthcare access as the primary drivers pulling the national average down
In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale in the Pacific, leaving 20 men in three small boats 2,000 miles from land, and the survivors' decisions over the next 90 days would later inspire Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
