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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 human body replaces almost all of its cells over a roughly 7-10 year period — but the neurons in your cerebral cortex are almost certainly the same age as you are
Microsoft built an anechoic chamber so quiet that the background noise drops below the threshold of human hearing, and nobody has been able to sit inside it for more than 45 minutes because the brain begins to hallucinate when the only sounds left are your own heartbeat and lungs
Michael Collins, dubbed by the press "the loneliest man in history" while orbiting the far side of the Moon for roughly forty-seven minutes at a time, gently corrected the description — he said he felt isolated, but never lonely
The human brain accounts for about two per cent of body weight and consumes about twenty per cent of the body's total energy every day — and that consumption barely changes whether you are solving differential equations or staring at a wall
Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot photograph was nearly never taken — Carl Sagan pushed NASA to turn the camera back toward Earth after the planetary mission was over, while engineers worried the Sun’s glare could damage the optics
Human creativity may have been forged by hardship rather than abundance — according to a new study of 146,000-year-old stone tools found in central China and dated to one of the harshest Ice Ages of early human history
Evidence of ancient life has just been found buried inside an asteroid crater — and the discovery suggests the warm lakes created by major impacts may have been some of the original cradles of life on Earth
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
Astrophysicists have a quiet ranking of Hollywood's space movies — and the films they consider most accurate aren't always the ones audiences remember as realistic
In 1518 in Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and began to dance, and within a month roughly 400 people were dancing alongside her — some of them, according to later accounts, until they collapsed and died — and no one has ever fully explained why
