rachel durfee

Overall, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?

This is the question participants in the University of Chicago's General Social Survey have been answering since 1972. Recently, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers took this survey's data from 1972 through 2006 to see if people had gotten happier since the decade of bell bottoms and disco.

The bright, pristine slopes are calling your name. You head up to the mountain at sunrise, strap on your skis, and hit the first run. Only, instead of the immaculate white snow you had been dreaming about, you find the snowpacks are not as bright white as they should be, and your run is accompanied by streams of melting snow following you down the side of the mountain. The culprit? Soot. This pollutant has been darkening and melting snow-covered mountains for awhile, but the first experiments to quantify how much soot contributes to snowpack melt were only carried out recently.

If your son was captain of the high school football team around 2,000 years ago, the mantle in your living room might look something like this: blue ribbon, gold medal, championship trophy, severed head from the opposing team on a string. Historians, archaeologists, scientists, and people with interesting hobbies have long known that the ancient South American culture responsible for the Nazca Lines in the highlands of Peru collected human heads as trophies.

Apparently, Rupert Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University in northern England, knows where to find a good party. Till took a second look, or rather, a second hear, at the 5,000-year-old Stonehenge and discovered that its huge stone slabs reflected sound perfectly, making the site the perfect place to listen to repetitive, trance-like music.

Ah, New Year's. The time for spirited debauchery, reflection on the year gone by, and resolutions for the year to come. On New Year's Day, most people wake up determined (through the haze of their hang-overs) to do something different this year, whether it be losing weight, learning a new skill, or to quit biting their nails. That's admirable, but for the risk-takers and more impulsive among us, keeping a new year's resolution may be near impossible, and it's due to the dope—or lack, thereof.

Back in pre-historic times, say, 130,000-30,000 years ago, Europe was dominated not by quaint cafes and dainty bakeries, but by a group of not-quite humans called Neanderthals. In the form of a common insult, their legacy lives on today, and perhaps more accurately than we think: new research suggests that the Neanderthal's extinction was not due to climate change (as was previously argued) but rather to their inability to beat the competition, which came in the form of Cro-Magnon—the first anatomically modern human population.

There is no denying we humans are obsessed with real estate. We always like to think we've landed ourselves a prime piece of land to settle on, and that outlook extends past your home, vacation home, and country and all the way out to the Earth itself.

The stereotype of pregnant women experiencing bizarre cravings has long had people believing that all expectant mothers go a little crazy when it comes to food and drink over the course of nine months. Though the image of a petite woman screaming at her husband at 2:00 in the morning, "I WANT BROCCOLI AND STRAWBERRY SYRUP!" may lead us to imagine that all pregnant women gain extra, non-baby weight, a recent study shows that those who are more likely to over-gain weight during pregnancy are overweight or obese mothers-to-be who underestimate their weight at the beginning of term.

If a man walks into a bar….who laughs? Liberals or conservatives? Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, and Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College, looked into just that question in a recent Boston study. The two came up with a list of 22 jokes – conventional, quirky, corny, clever, etc. – and tracked the reactions of about 300 people who were asked to rate the jokes on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious).