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 Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched into orbit on May 18, 1991, he was a citizen of the Soviet Union — and when he returned to Earth 311 days later in March 1992, the country that had sent him no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had been renamed St. Petersburg, and his spacesuit still bore the letters "USSR" and the red Soviet flag he had worn while the world below him quietly stopped existing
For 400 years, sailors crossing parts of the Indian Ocean have reported patches of sea glowing pale white from horizon to horizon, until satellite imagery finally captured the phenomenon and suggested it is likely the light of trillions of microscopic bioluminescent bacteria switching on at once
A Cambridge neuroscientist argues your brain fears not knowing more than it fears pain, and the people most at ease sitting inside that not knowing tend to be among the most creative ones in the room
A molecule called MHC I was understood for decades as the thing that lets the immune system recognize cancer, until researchers found the immune system attacks hardest exactly when cancer switches it off
By 2075, Goldman Sachs projects India will overtake the United States to become one of the world's two largest economies — driven by India's much younger population and continued urbanization — in what economists now describe as the largest shift in global economic power since the rise of the United States itself in the 20th century.
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
The giant stone statues of Easter Island, some weighing more than 80 tonnes and standing 10 metres tall, were moved kilometres across rough volcanic terrain by groups of 18 people pulling them upright with ropes, because the statues were specifically designed with a forward lean and a wide D-shaped base that turned every step of their transport into a controlled fall
Researchers had 124 adults cut their email checking to three times a day — what dropped wasn't their workload, it was their daily stress
In September 1969, a 100-kilogram space rock exploded in the sky above Murchison, Australia — and 50 years later, scientists analyzing dust grains buried inside the meteorite found particles between 5 and 7 billion years old, formed in the dying outer layers of stars that lived and died long before our Sun was born, in what remains the oldest solid material ever identified on the surface of the Earth
By the end of this century, the United States is projected to have more than one million centenarians — people aged 100 or older — for the first time in human history, in a demographic shift driven by sharply falling mortality among nonagenarians, and some demographers now believe that a majority of children born today in low-mortality countries can reasonably expect to reach their hundredth birthday
