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Everyone wants to be happy. It’s a fundamental human right. It’s associated with all sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right? Well, maybe not. A new research paper by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers from Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the desire for personal happiness, though knitted into the fabric of American history and culture, is held in less esteem by other cultures....

President Obama is expected to appeal to a cross section of Americans about the perils of rising temperatures and the economic benefits of dealing with climate change in a speech tomorrow that could establish a timeline for regulating carbon at existing power plants. The effort at depoliticizing the thorny topic of climate began Saturday in a campaign-style video in which Obama pointed to different areas of the public that he said can help address the effects of warming....

Our solar system’s first-known visitor from another star, the recently discovered object called ‘Oumuamua, could be a bonanza for researchers. With only a brief window of time to observe the cigar-shaped wanderer before it zooms beyond the reach of our best telescopes, astronomers have crammed in observations with the hopes of learning more about this interstellar interloper. Not only is the fast-moving object intriguing in its own right; it may also provide insights about how planetary systems evolve....

The robot in WALL-E may have befriended a cockroach, but humans are more likely to react with revulsion than joy at the sight of one. Would you feel differently, however, if you were trapped in a collapsed building or mine, and rescuers had sent a cockroach in to find you? A team of researchers says it can harness the cockroach’s uncanny survivability in ways that might someday benefit humanity. The trick is to fire wireless signals at a roach’s antennae and other sensory organs to guide it to a desired destination, says Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor in North Carolina State University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering....

The new study, published on Thursday in Science, analyzed tens of thousands of plant fossils and represents “a fundamental advance in knowledge,” says Peter Wilf, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the research. “The authors demonstrate that the dinosaur extinction was also a massive reset event for neotropical ecosystems, putting their evolution on an entirely new path leading directly to the extraordinary, diverse, spectacular and gravely threatened rain forests in the region today....

Dear EarthTalk: My husband and I want to start a garden this year. I really want to make compost from leftover food scraps and yard materials. He says it will attract unwanted animals, and refuses to agree to it. Is he right? If so, how do we deal with that issue in a green-friendly, non-lethal way? —Carmen Veurink, Grand Rapids, Mich. It’s true that outdoor compost piles and bins can be a draw for wildlife—be it bears, rats, raccoons, skunks, opossums or some other creatures of the night—but there are ways to minimize the attraction....

The president who stood in the Rose Garden Friday to deliver an address on lowering prescription drug prices wasn’t the same one who, less than 18 months ago, decried pharma companies for “getting away with murder.” Instead, standing next to the former CEO of Eli Lilly USA, a substantially less bombastic President Trump delivered a measured and speedy address—and unveiled a menu of potential policy changes—that hardly touch the industry he once denounced....

By Mike De Souza OTTAWA, May 25 (Reuters) - North American energy ministers said on Monday they had set up a working group on climate change and energy, a partnership designed to help Canada, the United States and Mexico harmonize policies. The partnership does not include binding targets, but will enhance cooperation and integrate more climate change-related policies into energy discussions between the countries, Canadian Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford said during a conference call....

Lurking behind the introduction of each new touch-screen computer, high-definition television and digital music player is the stark reality that some once-prized electronic gadgets from a previous techno-generation will get kicked to the curb, ending up in a toxic trash heap thousands of miles from its former owner. The reasons for this digital dumping are many, including ignorance of recycling options and indifference to the environmental impact. The remedy is straightforward—stricter governmental oversight, by the U....

Not even six months ago astronomers achieved a major milestone by successfully launching the shiny new James Webb Space Telescope. This summer we expect the observatory to start streaming data back to Earth, sharpening our eyes on the cosmos. And in May a planet-spanning, state-of-the-art observational tool—the Event Horizon Telescope—yielded the first image of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*. Chief features editor Seth Fletcher attended the announcement of the image in Washington, D....

If you heard that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity just spotted signs of life on the Red Planet—well, don’t get your hopes up. The odd tubular structures that Curiosity has been investigating lately were probably formed by crystal growth, not tiny burrowing creatures, mission team members said. “When we looked at these things close up, they’re linear, but they’re not tubular in the sense of being cylinders; they’re actually quite angular,” said Curiosity mission scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California....

In the spring of 2000 a professional guitarist named Diana Levine, then in her 50s, sought treatment for a migraine headache at a clinic in Vermont. She usually received the drug Demerol for pain relief, along with an injection of Wyeth’s antinausea drug Phenergan in the muscles of her butt to relieve the nausea that usually accompanies migraines. But this time the physician’s assistant used an alternative method for administering Phenergan approved by the U....

Representative Anthony Weiner, the once cheered, now shamed New York congressman, made at least two mistakes in the past two weeks. First, he lied—and then he cried. “I have exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years,” he admitted, after denying three days earlier that he publicly posted an R-rated photograph of himself via Twitter. He punctuated his June 6 confession with frequent sniffling....

Over the past four years, John Matthews has been traveling the world to better understand freshwater and climate change issues. He found that poor planning is creating one of the biggest water-related threats. “We need to think about managing water in a much more flexible way,” said Matthews, who is director of fresh water and adaptation at Conservation International. “Let’s not just design for a single future; let’s think about multiple possible futures....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The city of Mandu is situated about 35 km from Dhar in the Madhya Pradesh region of northern-central India. Most of the city’s monuments date to the 15th and 16th century CE. The city is located on a hill which rises 633 m above the sea level and is endowed with a very attractive natural scenery, which is best seen during the rainy season....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Material Objects & Cultures Material objects convey volumes about the people who possessed them. Cultures and societies in every generation are in part classified - either correctly or incorrectly - by the objects or symbols they select and how they are displayed. Typically, the formal study of society is the purview of anthropologists and social scientists who categorize ‘people’ into cultural assemblages which are extrapolated from commonly held ‘features’ (e....

Spontaneous mutations that occur between genes are as important in autism as those within genes, a new study suggests1. The study, published May 27 in Nature Genetics, is the first to look at the impact of these ‘noncoding’ mutations across the whole genomes of autistic people. Many teams over the past three years have sequenced the DNA of autistic people both within and between genes. Yet sorting through the hundreds of thousands of mutations between genes had seemed nearly impossible because researchers know so little about these genetic segments....

With the Broad Institute’s big win on Wednesday in its battle over key patents on the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, everything is now crystal clear. Kidding! The University of California seemed to be the loser, since the patent judges denied its effort to effectively block the Broad’s patents. But in a call with reporters, Paul Alivisatos, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research, was upbeat that the ruling would allow UC’s patent claims to finally “move forward....

A new lithium ion battery technology may finally make the devices cheap enough and durable enough to turn electric cars from a niche product into a mass-market mode of transport. Waltham, Mass.–manufacturer A123 Systems has produced a cell that delivers 20 percent more power, works at temperatures as low as –30 degrees Celsius and as high as 60 degrees C, and should be just as easy as current batteries to manufacture....

The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side by Marco Fontani Mariagrazia Costa Mary Virginia Orna Oxford University Press, 2014 (($39.95)) The journey to the periodic table of elements we know today was not smooth. Chemists Fontani, Costa and Orna tell the story of the false starts and stray paths that led to the “discovery” of many elements that turned out not to be. Some, such as “didymium,” were later revealed to be composites of multiple elements; others, such as “brevium,” were isotopes, or variations, on other elements (in this case, protactinium)....