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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
On the Japanese island of Okinawa, a cluster of villages produced so many people who lived past 100 that researchers spent decades studying their diet and eventually traced part of the effect to a purple sweet potato that supplied roughly 60 percent of daily calories through the first half of the twentieth century
Many people assume "honeymoon" came from a month of drinking honey wine after the wedding, but the earliest English uses, from the 1540s, may point somewhere colder — to a love as full as the moon and just as likely to wane
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life"
In 1962, a French cave explorer spent two months alone underground with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left
Astronauts, soldiers, and elite performers are all taught the same handful of body-based techniques to shut down panic in seconds, and none of them involve thinking positive thoughts.
Some of the loneliest people in their sixties aren't the ones without visitors, they're the ones whose family only asks how they are inside the same three-minute call before hanging up
Dogs assess more than a person’s posture, voice, or facial expression when they meet them; researchers who study canine olfaction have found that dogs can detect the chemical signature of psychological stress in human breath and sweat, meaning they may know your body is under pressure before you say a word
Quote by Viktor Frankl: When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves
Titan's air warms the surface and its sky cools it: the greenhouse effect adds about 38 degrees Fahrenheit while the high-altitude haze subtracts about 16, leaving the surface about 22 degrees warmer than Titan's effective temperature
On a popular South Korean online marketplace, more strollers were sold for pets than for babies in the first three quarters of 2023 — 57 percent pet, 43 percent baby, against 33 percent pet only two years earlier
