Friday, December 16, 2011
GDP Up, Happiness Down
Happiness has dropped over the last two years, University of Vermont research shows.
Happiness has dropped over the last two years, University of Vermont research shows.
A research team used a combination of historical evidence and scientific modeling to recreate the acoustic environment of Renaissance period Venice churches.
Cutting out short auto trips and replacing them with mass transit and active transport would yield major health benefits, according to a study just published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The biggest health benefit was due to replacing half of the short trips with bicycle trips during the warmest six months of the year, saving about $3.8 billion per year from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs for conditions like obesity and heart disease.
An international team—led by researchers at McMaster University and the University of Tubingen in Germany—has sequenced the entire genome of the Black Death, one of the most devastating epidemics in human history.
The prospect of doing human clinical trials with stem cells to treat diseases like multiple sclerosis may be growing closer, say scientists at UB and U of R who have developed a more precise way to isolate stem cells that will make myelin.
A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called “magic mushrooms,” was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.
Over the past decade, many studies and news media reports have suggested that action video games such as Medal of Honor or Unreal Tournament improve a variety of perceptual and cognitive abilities. But in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Walter Boot, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Department of Psychology, critically reevaluates those claims.
An international team of researchers believes it has identified the wild yeast that, in the age of sail, apparently traveled more than 7,000 miles to make a fortuitous microbial match that today underpins the $250 billion a year lager beer industry.
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite—temporarily designated P4—was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.
Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa.