Happiness & Success
Achieving Happiness Through Acceptance of Life
The quest for happiness often leads to frustration, as many fail to realize that the...
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- Written by: Kendra L. Smith, Arizona State University
Over the years, citizen scientists have provided vital data and contributed in invaluable ways to various scientific quests. But they’re typically relegated to helping traditional scientists complete tasks the pros don’t have the time or resources to deal with on their own.
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- Written by: Geoffrey Brooks, Swinburne University of Technology
Recently Sandfire Resources, a gold and copper producer based in Western Australia, announced its new solar power plant will soon start powering its DeGrussa mine. By replacing diesel power, the 10-megawatt power station, with 34,000 panels and lithium storage batteries, is expected to reduce the mine’s carbon emissions by 15%.
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- Written by: G. Owen Schaefer, National University of Singapore
Would you want to alter your future children’s genes to make them smarter, stronger or better-looking?
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- Written by: Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University and Erik C. Nisbet, The Ohio State University
The irony of internet freedom was on full display shortly after midnight July 16 in Turkey when President Erdogan used FaceTime and independent TV news to call for public resistance against the military coup that aimed to depose him.
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- Written by: Julie Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara
When children learn how to tie their shoelaces, they do so in discrete steps—making a loop or tugging at the lace. After enough repetition, our brain turns these steps into “chunks.”
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- Written by: Brian Byrne, University of New England; Katrina Grasby, University of New England, and Richard Olson, University of Colorado
Research shows that a student’s genetic makeup can have a strong influence on their academic performance.
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- Written by: Melissa Dickson, University of Oxford
We live, we are so often told, in an information age. It is an era obsessed with space, time and speed, in which social media inculcates virtual lives that run parallel to our “real” lives and in which communications technologies collapse distances around the globe.
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- Written by: Matthew Swayne, Penn State University
Mobile phone data may reveal an underlying mathematical connection between how we move and how we communicate. This could make it easier to predict how diseases—and even ideas—spread through a population.
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- Written by: Monique Patenaude, University of Rochester
"Our theory explains specifically why primates developed superintelligence but dinosaurs—who faced many of the same environmental pressures and had more time to do so—did not. Dinosaurs matured in eggs, so there was no linking between intelligence and infant immaturity at birth," says Celeste Kidd.
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- Written by: Jeremy Gibbons, Professor of Computing, University of Oxford
From the transforming discovery of penicillin to the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, science progressed with mind-boggling speed even before there were computers. Much of this is down to the robustness of the scientific method: scientific results are validated by being replicated and extended by other scientists.
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- Written by: David Dunning, Professor of Psychology
In the hours since I first sat down to write this piece, my laptop tells me the National Basketball Association has had to deny that it threatened to cancel its 2017 All-Star Game over a new anti-LGBT law in North Carolina – a story repeated by many news sources including the Associated Press.
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- Written by: Scott Ewing, Senior Research Fellow - The Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology
Ask around – everyone has an opinion about their email and their inbox, and it’s not always positive. From information overload, zero inbox and leaked email scandals to the much-hyped triumph of workflow software like Slack and Asana, email has certainly had a bad rap recently.
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- Written by: Paula Kover, Reader in Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath
Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here”, former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory – asking “if humans evolved from monkeys, why haven’t today’s monkeys evolved”?
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- Written by: Vivian Siegel, Visiting Instructor of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Extra, extra! The embargo’s lifted, read all about it. Rumors were flying through the blogosphere this winter: physicists at the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) may finally have directly detected gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted by Einstein 100 years ago in his general theory of relativity. Gravitational waves were predicted to be produced by cataclysmic...
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- Written by: Jonathan Roberts, Professor in Robotics, Queensland University of Technology
Imagine your child requires a life-saving operation. You enter the hospital and are confronted with a stark choice. Do you take the traditional path with human medical staff, including doctors and nurses, where long-term trials have shown a 90% chance that..
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- Written by: Sara Rimer, Boston University
"The research was just one experiment in a lab," Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times about the study, "but it does point to the larger subject of striking a balance between connectedness and isolation in the digital age."
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- Written by: Rob Jordan, Stanford University
Every year, people in the US throw away 2.5 billion plastic foam cups—and that’s just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic that Americans throw out each year.
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- Written by: Emil Venere-Purdue
Apps drain 28.9 percent of smartphone battery power while the screen is off, according to the first large-scale study of smartphones in everyday use.
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- Written by: Phil McKenna, Ensia
As petroleum-based polymers foul our oceans and litter our lives, researchers seek more environmentally friendly ways to meet demand for durable, versatile materials.
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- Written by: Juliette McGregor, University of Leicester
Ever fancied having a superpower? Something you can call upon when you need it, to hand you extra information about the world? OK, it’s not X-ray vision, but your eyes do have abilities that you might not be aware of.
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- Written by: Sarah Yang-Berkeley
Fans of homebrewed beer and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. Now, bioengineers have gone much further by completing key steps needed to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing morphine and potentially other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer therapeutics.
