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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
There is a moment near death, documented in EEG recordings of dying patients, when the brain produces a coordinated burst of gamma wave activity more intense than anything measured in waking life — and no one knows what it is, what it's for, or what the person experiencing it perceives
Most Woman of the Year awards are handed over at a gala dinner. Sweden's 2026 winner accepted hers over a live video link from the International Space Station.
Crows can recognise individual human faces, hold grudges against specific people for years, and teach those grudges to their offspring who have never met the human in question
NASA's playbook for staying intact through long isolation
Rubin Observatory will sift 10,000 comets from a decade of nightly sky imagery while Walter Reed left 1,300 facial CT scans unread for five years — the same archival-image problem, solved in one domain and chronic in another
Europe launches a new mission to image Earth's magnetic shield in 2026 while the operational satellite warning of solar storms is a 1995 spacecraft running 28 years past retirement — the gap between discovery science and operational continuity within a single agency
Forty years and multi-tonne xenon detectors have brought dark-matter searches to the 'neutrino fog' without a signal, while a tentative hint surfaces in LIGO data built to listen for colliding black holes — and the pattern of paradigms exhausting themselves into adjacent instruments is older than physics admits
A joint European-Chinese magnetosphere mission launches in 2026 — the same year Brussels closes most of its €93.5 billion Horizon Europe programme to Chinese institutions, and the carve-out reveals which knowledge Europe still classifies as 'merely curious'
Intuitive Machines is buying a global ground-station network for $49.6 million after landing two probes on their sides — and the sequencing tells you which moats the CLPS contracting model rewards first
ESA and China’s Smile mission is set to launch on May 19, and it exposes the space-policy split Washington’s Wolf Amendment built into the Western alliance
