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Happiness just can’t be forced. Studies have shown that trying to feel happier in a given moment backfires and can actually make people feel worse. And simply paying attention to one’s level of happiness tends to make the glass look half-empty. So how can you gain the many rewards of happiness—which include better health and stronger relationships—without forcing it? Recent findings suggest rather than striving to boost happiness in the moment, a more effective route is to maximize your odds by making a concerted effort to plan your time around activities you think you will enjoy....

Many moths have evolved sensitive hearing that can pick up the ultrasonic probes of bats that want to eat them. But one species comes pre-adapted for anything that bats might bring to this evolutionary arms race. Even though its ears are extremely simple — a pair of eardrums on its flanks that each vibrate four receptor cells — it can sense frequencies up to 300 kilohertz, well beyond the range of any other animal and higher than any bat can squeak....

Researchers in the US have demonstrated a remarkably efficient new way to distil alcohol from water—using light. The method needs less energy than conventional thermal distillation and produces a more concentrated distillate. While the new method is unlikely to displace conventional distillation in industry, the researchers say, it could find niche applications in separation and purification processes. Naomi Halas and co-workers at Rice University in Houston laced a mixture of water and ethanol with gold–silica nanoparticles and shone laser light on the suspension from above....

The hunt is on to find “Planet Nine”—a large undiscovered world, perhaps 10 times as massive as Earth and four times its size—that scientists think could be lurking in the outer solar system. After Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, other teams have searched for further proof by analyzing archived images and proposing new observations to find it with the world’s largest telescopes....

The public should know soon if NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will get to perform a second epic flyby in the dark depths of the outer solar system. New Horizons team members have officially submitted an extended-mission proposal for the probe, which captured the first-ever up-close looks at Pluto during a historic flyby of the dwarf planet last July. NASA is now evaluating the proposal and will decide by June or July whether to approve and fund this “Kuiper Belt Extended Mission” (KEM), said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern....

The critically acclaimed television series 30 Rock has one episode in which variety show host Tracy Jordan plans to create a pornographic video game. Frank Rossitano, a writer in this fantasy of what happens behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live–like comedy show, informs Jordan that the game would surely flop because of something called the uncanny valley. He even produces a graph to demonstrate why failure is all but inevitable....

By Geoff BrumfielLow-power computer chips that don’t rely on an electrical current to handle data have just come a big step closer.The key result, unveiled today in Nature1, sounds deceptively simple: scientists have injected electrons into silicon at room temperature and set a majority of them spinning in the same direction.But the experiment “is a real breakthrough”, says Jaroslav Fabian, a theoretical physicist at the University of Regensburg, Germany. “Silicon is entering in a big way into spintronics....

In research that could be harnessed to speed recovery from stroke or blunt-force trauma to the head, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, report that mice genetically engineered to have holes in a region of their brain recovered due to the work of stem cells in the area. The findings will be published in the December 15 issue of the journal Cell. Principal investigator Yuh-Nung Jan and his team developed a mutant line of mice that, upon receiving an injection just after birth, did not develop the genes Numb and Numblike in their brains’ subventricular zones (SVZ), an area along the lateral wall of the lateral ventricles (two cavities) that are part of the brain’s main communication hub....

When fighting battles in the gut, pathogens that cause food poisoning may have a secret weapon. Natural ubiquitous sugar may help invading bacteria defeat the body’s natural microbiota. Emerging work looking at the role of one common sugar in the body, fucose (not to be confused with fructose), suggests that it may play an essential handmaiden role for certain harmful bacteria. A new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash....

Wind and sunshine could power most of the United States by 2030 without raising electricity prices, according to a new study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Even when optimizing to cut costs and limiting themselves to existing technology, scientists showed that renewables can meet energy demands and slash carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector by 80 percent below 1990 levels. The study, published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, factors in energy demand, costs and, crucially, the role of weather....

(Reuters) - A panel convened by U.S. President Donald Trump to tackle the opioid crisis called on Wednesday for more treatment programs, tighter prescribing guidelines and additional drug courts to help reduce overdose deaths. The commission, led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, said the recommendations would require funding by Congress but did not recommend an amount. Trump last week declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. Public health experts broadly welcomed the proposed measures....

The amount of energy Americans use and the pollution they emit from using coal, oil and natural gas are not likely to change radically over the next 30 years, even as the U.S. becomes a major energy exporter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook, published Thursday. The outlook, which does not factor in any policies from the incoming fossil fuel-friendly Trump administration, shows that the U.S. is unlikely to make significant gains in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement, even though zero-carbon renewables are expected to grow faster than any other energy source over the next three decades....

At the 2008 summer Olympics, Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, broke two world records, earning the title “the world’s fastest man.” He sprinted 100 meters in 9.69 seconds and 200 meters in 19.30 seconds. Bolt’s top speed of 37.6 kilometers per hour (23.4 miles per hour) is impressive for us humble humans. But it’s barely a jog for many animals. In a global competition, we would not even medal. N. C....

MARCH 1955 THE CURTAIN WALL–“The term ‘curtain wall’ is used nowadays to describe the sheath, or ‘skin,’ of a modern building. It looks quite different from its predecessor, the old load-bearing wall, and in fact it represents a big advance in architectural evolution. The structural specialization involved in separation of the skin and the skeleton in a building corresponds to the specialization of tissue in biological evolution. Yet no building skin today approaches the performance of the biological world....

By Lucy Nicholson East Porterville Calif. (Reuters) - In one of the towns hardest hit by California’s drought, the only way some residents can get water to flush the toilet is to drive to the fire station, hand-pump water into barrels and take it back home. The trip has become a regular ritual for East Porterville residents Macario Beltran, 41, and his daughters, who on a recent evening pumped the water into containers in the bed of his old pickup truck to be used for bathing, dish washing and flushing....

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazineClimate change represents a threat not only to the existence of individual species, but also to the genetic diversity hidden within them, researchers say. The finding promises to complicate assessments of how climate change will affect biodiversity, as well as conservationists’ task in preserving it.DNA studies have revealed that traditional species, as defined by taxonomists, contain a vast amount of ‘cryptic’ diversity – such as different lineages, or even species within species....

Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of The Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) Over the past few years, teams of scientists have been finding genetic glitches related to a wide variety of disorders by sequencing exomes, the protein-coding portions of the genome. But these genetic tests are typically out of reach for people unless they enroll in research studies, and even then, they’re almost never privy to their individual results....

The lack of refrigeration remains a vexing problem in vaccinating the world’s poor, because drugs often lose their efficacy in the heat. One solution 200 years ago was to propagate the vaccine in orphan children. “It was a really fascinating idea,” remarks Charles Arntzen, founder of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University–but not one to be implemented today. Instead Arntzen has hopes for vaccines that exist inside crops and could just be eaten....

The Dell Venue 8 Pro delivers full Windows 8.1 in a $299 package On Friday, Dell began selling one of the first tablets with Intel’s Bay Trail processor, as small Windows 8.1 devices go quad core. The $299 Dell Venue 8 Pro can be ordered online starting Friday with an estimated shipment date of October 25. The tablet sports a quad-core Intel Atom Z3740D “Bay Trail” processor rated at speeds of up to 1....

A darkening of the Martian surface may have slowly warmed the planet over the past 20 years. Based on a model of the Red Planet’s climate, researchers report that the brightness or darkness of its sands have a strong effect on its atmospheric temperature. They found that the heat absorbed by dark rock kicks up winds that blow away shiny dust, leaving behind even darker rock. But the predicted warming is hard to confirm, researchers say, and could shift with the sands at any time....