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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Almost every encrypted secret being protected today — banking records, classified government cables — is expected to become readable within the next decade once quantum computers arrive, and intelligence agencies are already stockpiling that data, in a strategy called "harvest now, decrypt later"
A seismic wave from Japan's 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake travelled nearly 2,900 kilometres down to Earth's core, bounced back to the surface 13 minutes later, and shifted the entire country eastward by roughly six millimetres at the same instant — in the first observation of its kind ever recorded
The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street — a movie about financial fraud — was financed in part with money U.S. prosecutors say was stolen from Malaysia's 1MDB national fund
The dust in your home is not just dirt — it is a mixture of skin, fabric, pollen, soil, insects, microbes, smoke, and microscopic plastic, turning an ordinary windowsill into a quiet archive of what has entered the room
Thought of the day from Carl Jung: "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes"
Researchers found that people who often share meals with others tend to report greater wellbeing, a link about as strong as income or having a job
The ideal amount of leisure time might be less than you think; research suggests somewhere around two to five hours a day
A self-taught Russian amateur astronomer named Filipp Romanov has been finding asteroids that NASA-funded sky-surveys missed — including a near-Earth asteroid he spotted in February 2026 before any of the professional systems noticed it — working from a village on Russia's Sea of Japan coast, and naming each new asteroid he finds after one of his great-grandparents
A 43,000-year-old stone roughly the size of a potato, found in a rock shelter in central Spain, was confirmed in 2025 to bear a single red-ochre fingerprint in its centre — placed deliberately by a Neanderthal so that the rest of the stone resembled a face — making it one of the oldest known examples of human-like abstract thinking in the prehistoric record, by a species many people still imagine as incapable of art
Researchers tracked football fans and found they tended to overestimate how long the result would affect their mood, though prompting them to consider other upcoming events softened the forecast
