A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can – it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.
“Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “People just might be using it wrong.”
Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.
via Happiness: A buyer’s guide – The Boston Globe. Continue reading “Can Money Buy Happiness?”
Teenage lottery winner Callie Rogers has confessed to blowing £250,000 on cocaine and said she should never have been allowed to spend her fortune at such a young age. Miss Rogers, 22, scooped £1.9million when she hit the jackpot in 2003 at the age of 16 and went on a never-ending spending spree.
In the deep blue waters of the South Pacific, cameraman Marco Queral gets up close and personal with a humpback whale.
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IBM researchers, along with scientists at the California Institute of Technology, have discovered that the tiny components that run along a chip’s silicone surface will self-adhere to previously laid down DNA patterns.