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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
In 1943, British intelligence planted a dead body off the coast of Spain carrying fake invasion plans, dressed as a fictional officer with a made-up love life and unpaid bills sewn into his pockets for realism — and Hitler believed every word of it, moving his troops away from the real target and leaving it exposed
SpaceX shares priced at $135 in June's record-breaking IPO, spiked above $225, then slid back below their starting price, and on 6 August a lockup expiry could more than quadruple the number of shares investors are able to trade
Women born in South Korea in 1896 were estimated to average about 142 centimetres tall. Those born in 1996 averaged about 162. No female population gained more — 20.2 centimetres across a century of birth cohorts
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Occupy thyself with few things, says the philosopher, if thou wouldst be tranquil."
I watched the sky over a wildfire evacuation near Toledo turn orange, though the strangest part was not the sky but how familiar it felt to be told to leave
U-2 spy planes flew so far above anything 1950s commercial pilots had ever seen that sunlight on their wings triggered a wave of UFO reports — and the CIA let the world believe in aliens rather than admit it was watching from above
Research cited by Singapore's urban planners suggests shading roads with trees can reduce street-level temperatures by up to 2.6 degrees Celsius — separately, models suggest tree shade on buildings can meaningfully lower air-conditioning demand nearby
In a 1962 Southern textile factory, 62 workers, nearly all women, fell ill with nausea and rashes after believing insects from a fabric shipment were biting them — no bug, no toxin, nothing was ever found, and the case became a foundational study in mass psychogenic illness
Shown two everyday objects and asked which one they had seen first, 50 adults pointed to the wrong object 78 percent of the time, and the wrong object was always the one they had seen most often
Spending months in space quietly rebuilds an astronaut's body: bones thin, the heart shrinks, fluid floods the head and can reshape the eyes, and NASA's study of twins found some of the changes still had not fully reversed months after landing
