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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.


Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-of-life field for decades

Why the years seem to speed up as we age, and how focusing on one thing might make time feel slower again

The Greeks had two words for time — and perhaps most of us focus on the wrong type. Chronos is the clock, minutes ticking evenly past. Kairos is the lived kind: the absorbed afternoon gone in a blink, the charged moment that seems to hold still

Life only ever happens in the present, yet most of us spend it somewhere else — rehearsing the future, replaying the past, half-watching the moment we're actually in

Scientists have discovered that air filters can capture DNA floating in the atmosphere and it can identify wildlife, viruses, and even plants linked to drugs nearby

Life slowly becomes whatever we give our attention to, whether we notice that choice or not

There's a reason "the good old days" tend to look sunnier in the rear-view mirror. Memory, it turns out, is often kinder than experience ever was

A study of nearly 20,000 people found there's a weekly amount of time in nature linked to real gains in health and wellbeing — and it's probably less than you think

The kiwifruit was once called the Chinese gooseberry, until New Zealand growers renamed it in 1959 to escape Cold War suspicion, berry tariffs, and a name shoppers did not want

Hearing is widely believed to be the last sense to fade, and a 2020 University of British Columbia EEG study on dying hospice patients found their brains still responded to sound in the final hours of unresponsiveness, suggesting the voices of loved ones in the room are genuinely reaching them
