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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Scientists studying centenarians — people who live past 100 — have found that they don't age much more slowly than the rest of us for most of their lives, but they appear to delay the diseases that kill most other people by an average of 15 to 20 years, in a quiet pattern that suggests longevity may have less to do with slow aging and more to do with avoiding the conditions that cause it
The total number of possible chess games is so large that it exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe — by some estimates, there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in approximately a trillion trillion trillion universes like ours — and despite this near-infinite possibility space, modern chess engines can now defeat any human grandmaster who has ever lived, in any opening position they care to attempt
The world's longest direct passenger flight is between New York and Singapore — a non-stop journey covering roughly 15,300 kilometers and taking about 18 hours and 50 minutes — and during that single flight, the aircraft crosses 12 time zones, burns approximately 110,000 kilograms of jet fuel, and passes over more of the Earth's surface than the entire span of the Roman Empire at its peak
If the universe is infinite — which current cosmology suggests is genuinely possible — then somewhere out there, beyond the part we can observe, there is an exact copy of the Earth, an exact copy of you, reading an exact copy of this sentence at exactly this moment, because in an infinite universe every possible arrangement of matter must occur not once, but an infinite number of times
The last person on Earth who had been married to a Civil War veteran was still alive in 2020 — Helen Viola Jackson, who married a 93-year-old Union soldier named James Bolin in 1936 when she was 17, and who lived through the entire 20th century into the COVID-19 pandemic as a living link to a war that ended 155 years before her death.
The 1983 made-for-TV film 'The Day After' was watched by an estimated 100 million Americans on a single Sunday night, and Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that it left him 'greatly depressed', a reaction his biographers later linked directly to his push for the Reykjavik disarmament summit three years later.
Thought of the day from philosopher Alan Watts: "The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance"
Across 19,000 people aged 18 to 68, researchers found we readily admit how much we’ve changed in the last decade — yet expect to barely change in the next, as though we’d only just become our finished selves
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
