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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The international space station runs on a five-day work and two-day rest schedule deliberately mirroring the rhythm of an earth working week and the reason isn't sentimental
The astronauts on the International Space Station see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day, and the question of when to sleep, when to pray, and when to celebrate birthdays has caused genuine philosophical problems for every space agency that has ever sent humans up there
Astronaut Chris Hadfield says confidence on the ISS didn't come from optimism — it came from what he calls the power of negative thinking, the practice of working out your most likely failure points before you start
The Sumerians wrote down complaints, love letters, lullabies, and arguments about the price of copper on clay tablets 4,000 years ago — and the things they were worried about are almost indistinguishable from the things people post online today
Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world's most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet's largest desert thousands of miles away.
NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on Mars that may be billions of years old — and the scientists studying them are being careful about what they say next
Interstellar's most-discussed scene is treated as exotic science fiction, but the family-separation problem it dramatises is one of the more actively studied subjects in long-duration mission planning.
Most people who say they want to be alone are not actually wanting solitude but a particular kind of presence around them that does not require them to perform
Nobody talks about why public enthusiasm for space collapsed at almost exactly the same moment that two billionaires became its most visible faces
People who are genuinely kind but feel virtually alone in the world have usually figured out something most adults haven't admitted yet — that being warm to everyone is not the same as being known by anyone, and the small daily difference between the two adds up across decades
