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Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness....

Santino was a misanthrope with a habit of pelting tourists with rocks. As his reputation for mischief grew, he had to devise increasingly clever ways to ambush his wary victims. Santino learned to stash his rocks just out of sight and casually stand just a few feet from them in order to throw off suspicion. At the very moment that passersby were fooled into thinking that he meant them no harm, he grabbed his hidden projectiles and launched his attack....

As I mentioned in my Scientific American column this month, “native” advertising is taking over. These ads sneak onto Web sites and apps, masquerading as content. Native advertising was born from the modern mobile milieu: touch screen phones and tablets. Traditional, space-gobbling display ads don’t work well when the screen is tiny, so the ad industry has settled on a different approach: articles that closely resemble the “real” stories around them....

By Mark Hosenball and David Shepardson The Trump administration is likely to expand a ban on laptops on commercial aircraft to include some European countries, but is reviewing how to ensure lithium batteries stored in luggage holds do not explode in midair, officials briefed on the matter said on Wednesday. Any expansion of the ban could impact U.S. carriers such as United Airlines (UAL.N), Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL.N) and American Airlines Group (AAL....

Is any age group more maligned than teenagers? As they roam in packs, they’re feared, avoided or told to calm down. They’re gawky, narcissistic, hormone-addled, shallow, angsty and entitled. And on top of all that: Have you heard? Smartphones are destroying their brains. Raised in the glow of digital devices, today’s teens are depressed, anxious, antisocial and hopelessly distracted. Smartphones have become a touchstone of adolescence in large part because they are nearly ubiquitous....

California officials have ordered an emergency shut-down of 11 oil and gas waste injection sites and a review more than 100 others in the state’s drought-wracked Central Valley out of fear that companies may have been pumping fracking fluids and other toxic waste into drinking water aquifers there. The state’s Division of Oil and Gas and Geothermal Resources on July 7 issued cease and desist orders to seven energy companies warning that they may be injecting their waste into aquifers that could be a source of drinking water, and stating that their waste disposal “poses danger to life, health, property, and natural resources....

The 114th U.S. Congress, infused with 71 new members elected last fall, will begin to hammer out a federal budget this month. In an era of tight spending and lingering economic malaise, this Congress—and the White House—might be tempted to limit funding for basic science in favor of applied research that has more direct payoffs. Politicians of both major parties have done so before. We urge them not to do it again and to instead renew a law that is vital to basic research....

Physicists have used the by-products of cosmic rays to reveal a large, previously unidentified chamber inside the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt. The find is the first discovery since the nineteenth century of a major new space inside the pyramid. Egyptologists have been quick to dismiss any idea of finding lost treasure in the 30-metre-long void. “There’s zero chance of hidden burial chambers,” says Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who studies ancient Egyptian tombs....

People are fascinated by the intelligence of animals. In fact, cave paintings dating back some 40,000 years suggest that we have long harbored keen interest in animal behavior and cognition. Part of that interest may have been practical: animals can be dangerous, they can be sources of food and clothing, and they can serve as sentries or mousers. But, another part of that fascination is purely theoretical. Because animals resemble us in form, perhaps they also resemble us in thought....

Facing bipartisan hostility over high drug prices in an election year, the pharma industry’s biggest trade group boosted revenue by nearly a fourth last year and spread the millions collected among hundreds of lobbyists, politicians and patient groups, new filings show. It was the biggest surge for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA, since the group took battle stations to advance its interests in 2009 during the run-up to the Affordable Care Act....

Call it the ultimate absentee ballot. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station have the option of voting in tomorrow’s (Nov. 6) presidential election from orbit, hundreds of miles above their nearest polling location. Astronauts residing on the orbiting lab receive a digital version of their ballot, which is beamed up by Mission Control at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Filled-out ballots find their way back down to Earth along the same path....

A few dozen nanoseconds, an imperceptibly slim interval in everyday life, can make all the difference in experimental physics. A European physics collaboration made a stunning announcement September 23, after having clocked elementary particles called neutrinos making the underground journey from a lab in Switzerland to one in Italy. The neutrinos made the trip 60 nanoseconds faster than they would have traveling at light speed, the researchers found. Faster, that is, than the rules of physics as we understand them would allow....

A New York City postal processing facility that was contaminated during the 2001 anthrax attacks is now the site of the largest “green roof” in Manhattan. The 65,000-square-foot roof area at the Morgan Processing and Distribution Center on Ninth Avenue between West 29th and West 30th streets cost $5 million to install in 2008. It affords views of such landmarks as the Empire State Building and is one of several pilot green roofs in the metropolitan area....

Crude oil and retail gas hit record high prices last week—more than $135 a barrel and $3.83 for an average gallon of regular. During a congressional hearing, lawmakers verbally pummeled oil execs for raking in profits while consumers endure pain at the pump. “Does it trouble any of you when you see what you’re doing to us?” Sen. Richard Durbin (D–Ill.) asked industry officials hauled to Capitol Hill to testify on skyrocketing oil prices....

On a clear night, away from city lights, you might see a beautiful structure arched across the sky: our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Since ancient times, humans have marveled at the dark dust clouds silhouetted against the milky background. Just four centuries ago Galileo pointed his telescope at the heavens and found that the milk was the blended light of countless stars. The architecture of the Milky Way has just been revised again....

The COVID pandemic is by no means over. Despite plunging case numbers in the U.S. as of this writing, many countries in the world are still experiencing peak infection rates. And it is impossible to foresee how the SARSCoV- 2 saga will unfold in the coming months or years. Since 2020 in this country (and others), hard truths about our deficient health-care system, rampant societal inequality and flawed policy-making engine, to name a few, have crystallized—painfully in some cases....

By Ana Belluscio Argentinian investigators have found flamingos and mysterious microbes living in an alkaline lagoon nestled inside a volcano in the Andes. The organisms, exposed to arsenic and poisonous gases, could shed light on how life began on Earth, and their hardiness to extreme conditions may hold the key to new scientific applications. In 2009, a team led by María Eugenia Farías, a microbiologist at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Tucumán, Argentina, discovered living stromatolites in the Socompa and Tolar Grande lagoons high in the Andes–collections of photosynthetic microorganisms and calcareous concretions–are thought to have been common more than 3....

On October 8, 2020, Indian authorities arrested Stan Swamy, an 83-year-old Jesuit priest affected by Parkinson’s disease, from his home in the state of Jharkhand. Swamy is being held under an antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), that a group of United Nations’ Special Rapporteurs has condemned for enabling the Indian state to designate dissidents as terrorists and detain them for months without access to courts. Swamy joins dozens of other prominent individuals—lawyers, writers, academics, journalists, poets, performers and others—who have also been arrested and charged under UAPA for inciting mob violence, links with Maoist insurgents, and other serious crimes....

These were the angst-ridden words of Tim Lake, describing a lady who had come to his door. I am grateful to Slothed.com for revealing CBS 5 Arizona’s emotional report. It shows that Lake couldn’t take this light-fingeredness lightly. More Technically Incorrect Family films as lightning strikes car, recharges phones Cowboys star watches son’s birth on iPhone Man steals church computer, demands porn block removed Apple bans app that wants you to throw your phone in the air Stolen computers arrive back at nonprofit – with apology note He set up an e-mail address in the hope that someone would offer him an anonymous tip as to who this woman might be....

We make decisions all day long, from mundane choices about what to eat for breakfast to life-changing ones such as whom to marry. In Decide: Better Ways of Making Better Decisions (Kogan Page, 2013), David Wethey, a decision-making expert, lays out guidelines to help people cope with the stream of daily choices and understand which tactics work and which do not. For instance, Wethey advocates factoring in the personalities involved in a situation as well as listening to your gut....