Can Money Buy Happiness?

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?”

Teen Lotto Winner Blows $3.1 million

Callie Rogers, from Cockermouth in Cumbria, pictured with her chTeenage 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 a frank interview she told how her drug addict boyfriend Nicky Lawson got her hooked on cocaine too and she wasted a fortune on the drug. The former shop assistant believes she shouldn’t have had access to her winnings until she was old enough to deal with her wealth sensibly.

via How teen Lotto winner Callie blew her £2m fortune – including £250,000 on cocaine | Mail Online.

Continue reading “Teen Lotto Winner Blows $3.1 million”

Why is There Peace?

Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is. Read on with the link below.

via Greater Good Magazine | Why is There Peace?. Continue reading “Why is There Peace?”

Swimming With Whales

divingwithwhalesIn the deep blue waters of the South Pacific, cameraman Marco Queral gets up close and personal with a humpback whale.

The experienced diver even seems to be hitching a lift on the flipper of the 50ft female. Queral, 42, who has spent 17 years taking such remarkable pictures, said: ‘Whales are extremely intelligent. Just like humans, they have their own mind and come with strong personalities. Click the link below for more pictures.

via The underwater dance of David and Goliath: Diver perches on the fin of friendly 50ft humpback whale | Mail Online.

Fountain Of Youth Drugs

It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.

It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.

via Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging – NYTimes.com.

Wine Making Secrets Exposed

PH02261KDo you know what you were really drinking last night? The dirty secret about wine is that it frequently contains wood chips, chemicals, and something called Mega Purple. Since only a tiny amount is needed to fix an entire barrel, Mega Purple is probably being added to over 25 million bottles of wine annually. Thanks to that lovable Wino, Randy Marks

via The Great Wine Cover-up – The Daily Beast.

DNA To Self-Assemble Microchips

CyborgIBM 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.

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.

“The combination of this directed self-assembly with today’s fabrication technology could lead to substantial savings in the most expensive and challenging part of the chip-making process,”

via IBM Eyes DNA For Chip Development — InformationWeek.

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