What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
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
A 2013 University of Michigan study on rats found that in the 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, the brain produced a surge of high-frequency gamma waves more coherent than during waking life, a neural fireworks display some researchers think could underlie the vivid imagery reported in near-death experiences
New Zealand soldiers in the First World War were nicknamed Kiwis by their British counterparts long before the fruit took the name, and by 1919 a giant kiwi bird had been carved into the chalk hillside above Bulford Camp in Wiltshire, where it remains visible today.
Meta's smart glasses companion app was downloaded more than 50 million times before anyone disclosed that it already contained three AI models capable of detecting a face, generating a biometric fingerprint, and firing a notification that read 'Person Recognized'
Scientists spent years arguing that only a quantum computer could decode nitrogenase, the enzyme that makes most of life on Earth's nitrogen available — a classical computer at Caltech solved the key problem first
We tend to imagine happiness as a life of rest and leisure. But after years of study, one psychologist found that our deepest satisfaction arrives somewhere else — in the middle of a demanding task, where challenge and skill are finely matched and the ordinary sense of time and self slips away
