What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The rage some people feel when someone chews nearby isn't rudeness or a short fuse — researchers call it misophonia, and a decade of imaging and prevalence work points to an involuntary reaction with a measurable physiological signature, though the condition still has no diagnostic code
South Korea's birth rate fell to the lowest figure any country has recorded — so low that at 2023 rates a hundred adults would leave behind only about 36 children, and 157 elementary schools opened the following school year with no first graders at all
The phone call that sounds exactly like your grandchild — crying, saying they're in trouble and need money fast — may not be them at all, because researchers showed in 2023 that a familiar voice can be cloned from a three-second sample
In 2000, miners in Mexico broke through a wall and found a hidden cave of crystals taller than telephone poles — beautiful enough to seem invented, and so hostile that scientists worked inside in ice-packed cooling suits, typically for no more than half an hour, before the heat and humidity began shutting down the body's only way of shedding heat
The Oregon high desert is slowly erasing an entire city that thousands of people built in three years, and the reason they built it is stranger than the ruins.
Before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, he made one unusual demand: that a mathematician named Katherine Johnson check the computer's numbers by hand, saying that if she agreed they were right, he was ready to fly
In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones.
At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand metres down, lies a lake so lethal its discoverers named it the Jacuzzi of Despair — a pool of brine so dense it will not mix with the sea around it, its floor lined with the pickled remains of nearly everything that swims into it.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
The human mind has no single prime age. Raw processing speed appears to peak around 18 or 19, while short-term memory improves until about 25 and remains relatively stable for another decade. The ability to recognise other people’s emotions peaks much later, in the 40s or 50s, while vocabulary—a measure of accumulated knowledge—can keep improving into the late 60s or early 70s.
