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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Cats can't taste sweetness — evolution turned off the relevant gene in their distant ancestors when they became obligate carnivores, and without working sweet receptors, a cat is as indifferent to sugar as a person is to ultraviolet light
In a 1999 experiment, people were asked to watch a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed. Around half of them completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit stroll into the middle of the scene
The 1518 dancing plague of Strasbourg began when Frau Troffea stepped into the street and danced without stopping, drew as many as 400 townspeople into the mania, and later chronicles claimed some died before it ended on its own
The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland has seen hundreds of dogs leap from the same parapet since the 1950s, often on clear days from the right side, and one behavioural investigation pointed to the scent of mink below
The famous claim about archaeologists finding still-edible 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs is mostly folklore — but the underlying chemistry that makes honey nearly immortal in a sealed jar is real, well-documented, and perhaps even stranger than the myth
The rock formations in the Scottish Highlands and western Newfoundland match each other almost exactly — because the two were part of the same mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago, before the Atlantic Ocean opened and split them across what is now an entire ocean
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
Sharks have been swimming in Earth's oceans for roughly 450 million years — which means they predate the first tree by about 65 million years, and when sharks first appeared, the only plants on land were mosses and liverworts no taller than a few centimetres
Light takes about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth, but the energy carried in that sunlight was generated in the sun's core tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago — bouncing through the sun's interior for that entire time before finally escaping its surface and making the 8-minute trip across space
The Sahara is usually depicted as the world's largest desert, but because a desert is defined by rainfall rather than temperature, the entire continent of Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, with parts of its interior having received no significant precipitation for nearly 14 million years
