“Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)

Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:

I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.

What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.”

Read more at Wired

“Doesn’t it seem likely that the reason all of us can’t see God is because there is no God?

If God exists… why isn’t his existence obvious?

And is “free will” a good answer to this question?

A few weeks ago, in this very publication, I posed the question, “Why did God create atheists?” If God reveals himself to religious believers, in visions or revelations or other spiritual experiences… why doesn’t he do it with everyone? Why are those revelations so contradictory — not to mention so suspiciously consistent with whatever the people having them already believe or want to believe? And why doesn’t everyone have them? If God is real, I asked — if religious believers are perceiving a real entity with a real effect on the world — why isn’t it just obvious?

Why is God playing hide and seek?

When I wrote that piece, I addressed (and dismantled) two of the most common responses to this question: “God has revealed himself to you, you’ve just closed your heart to him,” and, “God doesn’t care if you’re an atheist — as long as you’re a good person, he doesn’t care if you believe in him.”

But I neglected to address one of the most common religious answers to this question:

Free will.”

Read more at AlterNet

“From Tolkien’s ring of power in The Lord of the Rings to Star Trek’s Romulans, who could make their warships disappear from view, from Harry Potter’s magical cloak to the garment that makes players vanish in the video game classic Dungeons and Dragons, the power to turn someone or something invisible has fascinated mankind. But who ever thought that a scientist at Michigan Technological University would be serious about building a working invisibility cloak?

That’s exactly what Elena Semouchkina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech, is doing. She has found ways to use magnetic resonance to capture rays of visible light and route them around objects, rendering those objects invisible to the human eye.

Semouchkina and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is also an adjunct professor, recently reported on their research in the journal Applied Physics Letters, published by the American Institute of Physics. Her co-authors were Douglas Werner and Carlo Pantano of Penn State and George Semouchkin, who works at Michigan Tech and Penn State.

They describe developing a nonmetallic cloak that uses identical glass resonators made of chalcogenide glass, a type of dielectric material (one that does not conduct electricity). In computer simulations, the cloak made objects hit by infrared waves—approximately one micron or one-millionth of a meter long—disappear from view.

Earlier attempts by other researchers used metal rings and wires. “Ours is the first to do the cloaking of cylindrical objects with glass,” Semouchkina said.”

Read more at Physorg

“Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we’d spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we’d be far happier. That’s according to Christopher Hsee and colleagues, who say we’re happier when busy but that unfortunately our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing – an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

Consider Hsee’s first study. His team offered 98 students a choice between delivering a completed questionnaire to a location that was a 15-minute round-trip walk away, or delivering it just outside the room and then waiting 15 minutes. A twist was that either the same or different types of chocolate snack bar were offered as a reward at the two locations.

If the same snack bar was offered at both locations then the majority (68 per cent) of students chose the lazy option, delivering the questionnaire just outside the room. By contrast, if a different (black vs. white) bar was offered at each location then the majority (59 per cent) chose the far away ‘busy’ option. This was the case even though earlier research showed both snack bar options were equally appealing, and even though the location of the two snack bar types was counterbalanced across participants. In other words, Hsee said, the students’ instinct was for idleness, but when they were given a specious excuse for walking further, most of them took the busy option. Crucially, when asked afterwards, the students who’d taken the walk reported feeling significantly happier than the idle students, consistent with Hsee’s theory that we’re happier when busy (a repeat of the study in which students were allocated without choice to the idle or busy condition led to the same outcome – the busier students felt happier).”

Read more at BPS Research Digest

“It will be harder to lie about your age or your poker hand after new research by the University of Melbourne, Australia has revealed that our eye position betrays the numbers we are thinking about.

In the study, participants were asked to state a series of random numbers. By measuring their vertical and horizontal eye position, researchers were able to predict with reliable confidence the next chosen number — before it was spoken. Specifically, a leftward and downward change in eye position announced that the next number would be smaller than the last. Correspondingly, if the eyes changed position to the right and upward, it forecast that the next number would be larger. The degree of eye movement reflected the size of the numerical shift.

The paper was published online in the journal Current Biology. First author, Dr Tobias Loetscher of the University of Melbourne’s School of Behavioural Sciences and previously of the Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland says the research demonstrates how the eyes and their position give insight into the nature of the systematic choices made by the brain’s random number generator.”

Read more at Science Daily

Fusion is arguably the perfect way to power the world. For one thing, there is enough fusion fuel to supply all of the world’s energy needs for millions of years. Furthermore, it produces no environmentally damaging wastes, no carbon dioxide emissions and there could be no accidents that require evacuating the population surrounding a fusion power plant. Fusion plants would also not need significant land area, and fusion fuels (lithium and deuterium) are available in seawater. Unfortunately, it is hard to make fusion work. Indeed, after more than 60 years of fusion research, no device has yet made more energy than it consumes.

Iter, the next fusion machine and the first to be built as an international collaboration, is designed to demonstrate the scientific feasibility of net energy production. It is expected that Iter will produce about 500MW of fusion power – 10 times the input power. Just as importantly, it will show how to integrate the many cutting-edge technologies required for efficient and reliable future power station designs. Put simply, it is the big step needed to prove the viability of fusion as a commercial energy source.

Unfortunately, Iter’s construction expenses have risen from about €5bn to over €13bn and the cost overruns have prompted some to questionw hy chasing nuclear fusion is a priority.

Stephen Cowley offers his opinion at the Guardian.

Nuclear Fusion explained at Wikipedia

“It’s an age-old puzzle that’s stumped generations of scientists. But now they believe they have cracked the conundrum of what came first: the chicken or the egg. British researchers say the chicken must have come first as the formation of eggs is only possible thanks to a protein found in the chicken’s ovaries.

‘It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,’ said Dr Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University, who worked with counterparts at Warwick University. ‘The protein had been identified before and it was linked to egg formation but by examining it closely we have been able to see how it controls the process,’ he added.

The protein – called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) – acts as a catalyst to speed up the development of the shell. Scientists used a super computer called HECToR, based in Edinburgh, to ‘zoom in’ on the formation of an egg. It showed OC-17 was crucial in kick-starting crystallisation – the early stages of forming a shell. The protein coverts calcium carbonate into calcite crystals which makes up the egg shell, creating six grammes of shell every 24 hours.

Prof John Harding, also of Sheffield University, said the discovery could have other uses. ‘Understanding how chickens make shells is fascinating in itself but can also give clues towards designing new materials,’ he said.”

Read more at The Metro

The BBC has unveiled its new look news website this morning, with a cleaner design and more social media integration the most obvious changes.

The site has only been live for a few hours, but has already attracted a fair amount of criticism from users. I’ve been taking a look at the new site…

This is the old BBC news page:

And the new version:

The new page has more white space and a little less clutter than the old version, partly thanks to the fact that the left hand navigational options have gone, replaced by a menu bar at the top of the page. I’m not sure about the new font though.

The video and live TV content is displayed more prominently on the right hand side of the page, the video is now shown in a larger size, while the site’s video content has been gathered together in one page.

The article pages have had the same treatment, with more white space behind the stories:

Old article page:

Instead of showing related links at the right hand side of the page, the top stories on the site and a box showing current features have been given more prominence. More links have been provided to allow readers to share articles on just about every social network, with Facebook and Twitter the most prominent.

Links to related articles and outbound links to other news sites are now shown at the foot of the page. This perhaps makes sense, since people will finish the article and want to read more, b

The new site seems to have divided opinion so far, which is natural for a redesign of such a popular website. Several commentors have picked up on the likeness to the CNN website, and the article pages on CNN are certainly similar.

There are 250+ comments on the BBC Editors’ Blog, and the majority of them are negative, though opinions via the Twitter hashtag #bbcnewssite are more positive towards the redesign. Stephen Fry likes it anyway…

“Watch your backs, professional origamists: researchers are working on a sheet of material that can fold itself. The sheets of material, called “programmable matter” by their inventors, use electric pulses to stimulate themselves into various folded shapes.

So far, one sheet can fold itself into a little boat or an airplane, but the creators envision wide-ranging applications for their programmable matter, from shelving to measuring utensils to a modern Swiss Army knife.

The programmable matter actually works much like origami, and the researchers have integrated some origami folding into its development. One of the first steps in the creation of their folding algorithms is to record a step-by-step unfolding of a real origami object, which they can then reverse and apply to the programmable matter sheets.

The half-millimeter thick sheets used in the experiment are squares made up of 32 triangles joined by flexible silicon seams. Each triangle has an actuator wired to it which, when stimulated, can force the triangle to fold at an angle to the surrounding triangles.

The folding instructions are stored in stickers that users can place on the surface of the sheet. Once a current is supplied, the sheet executes the folding algorithm in the sticker, following the steps until it reaches its final shape.”

Read more at Ars Technica