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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer's risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable
The marshmallow test, redone with ten times as many children, found that a four-year-old's willpower mostly stopped predicting teenage success once family background was taken into account
The Stanford study that tracked 'follow your passion' believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong
The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Athens, Rome, or Cairo — it is Jericho, in the West Bank, where archaeologists have found evidence of settlement going back roughly 11,000 years, meaning people have been living in the same place since the end of the last Ice Age, before writing, before metalworking, and at the dawn of agriculture itself
Above 26,000 feet on Mount Everest — in the death zone where the air contains roughly one-third the oxygen of sea level — climate change is melting the ice that has buried more than 200 frozen climbers, and Nepali army teams recovering them in 2024 also removed approximately 11 tonnes of trash, in a quiet revelation that the highest place humans have ever reached is also a slowly emerging landfill
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but the failure to become the self you were quietly meant to be — a despair so subtle that most people who carry it never notice they are carrying it — and the difficulty of late-life regret is the slow recognition that the person you have been is not quite the person you started out hoping to be
Nearly four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, Russian scientists in 2012 drilled into a hidden lake the size of Lake Ontario that had been sealed away for at least 15 million years — and when the drill broke through, the pressure was so great that the ancient lake water shot up the borehole and froze in place, freezing itself before anyone could touch it.
The average human brain now contains roughly a plastic spoon's worth of microplastic particles — about 50 percent more than brains collected in 2016 — according to a February 2025 study in Nature Medicine, meaning the blood-brain barrier, which evolution spent half a billion years building to keep foreign substances out, has quietly turned out to be transparent to a material humans first manufactured in 1907
People who began using hearing aids before age 70 reduced their long-term risk of developing dementia by approximately 61 percent — according to a 2025 Framingham Heart Study — yet roughly 60 to 90 percent of adults with hearing loss never wear them, meaning one of the most powerful documented dementia-prevention tools is sitting unused in millions of medicine cabinets.
Seven miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, in the deepest place on Earth, American explorer Victor Vescovo descended in 2019 to a depth where the pressure equals 50 jumbo jets stacked overhead — and at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where no light has ever reached, he found a plastic bag and several candy wrappers waiting on the seabed.
