Price of Happiness: It's Relatively Affordable

Can money really buy you happiness?

More and more research has concluded that the answer to that age old question is actually "no".

But, if there had to be a number put to it, there is a figure that the majority of folks have in mind when it comes to being happy and, interestingly enough, it's lower than you may expect. It's not one million dollars, and it's not 250 thousand dollars, the apparent price of happiness is actually right at $75,000.

Apparently anything less than $75,000 annually and folks are over-consumed with worry about debt and meeting "ends meet". Anything above $75,000 and it's not really happiness, just a compensation for a lack of happiness brought on by the problems that come with having more money.

"If survival is the primary human goal, happiness comes in at a close second," said Kip Parent, Chief Executive Office of Keirsey Research. "It's such a multifaceted emotion that is empacted by numerous variable, from personality type to age to parenting status. We wanted to learn more about who is happy and why."

According to the study, which used Keirsey's In-FlowTM "river" methodology, the happiest Americans are extroverts with an annual household income of $75,000 or slightly more. The least happy Americans are unemployed , closely followed by those who are separated by not divorced.

Source: keirseyresearch.com

Biorobotics: The Future Looks Awesome

Human devices, from light bulbs to iPods, send information using electrons. Human bodies and all other living things, on the other hand, send signals and perform work using ions or protons.

Materials scientists at the University of Washington have built a novel transistor that uses protons, creating a key piece for devices that can communicate directly with living things. The study is published online this week in the interdisciplinary journal Nature Communications.

Devices that connect with the human body’s processes are being explored for biological sensing or for prosthetics, but they typically communicate using electrons, which are negatively charged particles, rather than protons, which are positively charged hydrogen atoms, or ions, which are atoms with positive or negative charge.

“So there’s always this issue, a challenge, at the interface – how does an electronic signal translate into an ionic signal, or vice versa?” said lead author Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. “We found a biomaterial that is very good at conducting protons, and allows the potential to interface with living systems.”

In the body, protons activate “on” and “off” switches and are key players in biological energy transfer. Ions open and close channels in the cell membrane to pump things in and out of the cell. Animals including humans use ions to flex their muscles and transmit brain signals. A machine that was compatible with a living system in this way could, in the short term, monitor such processes. Someday it could generate proton currents to control certain functions directly.

A first step toward this type of control is a transistor that can send pulses of proton current. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a basic type of transistor that includes a gate, a drain and a source terminal for the current. The UW prototype is the first such device to use protons. It measures about 5 microns wide, roughly a twentieth the width of a human hair.

“In our device large bioinspired molecules can move protons, and a proton current can be switched on and off, in a way that’s completely analogous to an electronic current in any other field effect transistor,” Rolandi said.

On the left is a colored photo of the UW device overlaid on a graphic of the other components. On the right is a magnified image of the chitosan fibers. The white scale bar is 200 nanometers.

The device uses a modified form of the compound chitosan originally extracted from squid pen, a structure that survives from when squids had shells. The material is compatible with living things, is easily manufactured, and can be recycled from crab shells and squid pen discarded by the food industry.

First author Chao Zhong, a UW postdoctoral researcher, and second author Yingxin Deng, a UW graduate student, discovered that this form of chitosan works remarkably well at moving protons. The chitosan absorbs water and forms many hydrogen bonds; protons are then able to hop from one hydrogen bond to the next.

Computer models of charge transport developed by co-authors M.P. Anantram, a UW professor of electrical engineering, and Anita Fadavi Roudsari at Canada’s University of Waterloo, were a good match for the experimental results.

“So we now have a protonic parallel to electronic circuitry that we actually start to understand rather well,” Rolandi said.

Applications in the next decade or so, Rolandi said, would likely be for direct sensing of cells in a laboratory. The current prototype has a silicon base and could not be used in a human body. Longer term, however, a biocompatible version could be implanted directly in living things to monitor, or even control, certain biological processes directly.

The other co-author is UW materials science and engineering graduate student Adnan Kapetanovic. The research was funded by the University of Washington, a 3M Untenured Faculty Grant, a National Cancer Institute fellowship and the UW’s Center for Nanotechnology, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

source: washington.edu

Race To The Moon: Scientists Say, 'It's On Bitch!'

Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the Moon.

Spurred by a $30 million purse put up by Google, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon. Most of them are unlikely to overcome the financial and technical challenges to meet the contest deadline of December 2015, but several teams think they have a good shot to win — and to take an early lead in a race to take commercial advantage of our celestial neighbor.

At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy.

One Silicon Valley venture, Moon Express, is positioning itself as a future FedEx for Moon deliveries: if you have something to send there, the company would like to take it. Moon Express was having a party on Thursday night to show off the flight capabilities of its lunar lander, based on technology it licensed from NASA, and “to begin the next era of the private commercial race to the Moon,” as the invitation put it.

“In the near future, the Moon Express lunar lander will be mining the Moon for precious resources that we need here on Earth,” the invitation promised. “Years from now, we will all remember we were there.”

Naveen Jain, an Internet billionaire and a founder of Moon Express, says the company will spend $70 million to $100 million to try to win the Google Lunar X Prize, but could recoup its investment on its first flight. He envisions selling exclusive broadcast rights for video from the Moon, as well as sponsorships, à la Nascar, for companies to put their logos on the lander.

Or, perhaps, a tie-in to reality television.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a ‘Moon Idol,’ just like ‘American Idol?’ “ suggested Mr. Jain, who previously founded Infospace and Intelius. “You take the top 10 contestants and play their voices on the Moon, record it and see who sounds the best.”

(There is no air on the Moon to transmit sound waves, but “you could play it through the dust and see what it sounds like when you play it right on the surface,” Mr. Jain said. His point was that with cheap lunar transportation, there was no predicting what might catch people’s fancies.)

Another competitor, Astrobotic Technology, intends to sell berths on its lunar lander to space agencies and scientific institutions, which would pay $820,000 a pound to send up their experiments. The company, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, is building a large craft — much bigger than Moon Express’s — capable of carrying 240 pounds of payload (read: $200 million of cargo) and hopes to be ready to launch in December 2013.

“We can make a lot of money even if we do not win the prize,” said David Gump, president of Astrobotic, which is based in Pittsburgh. “We will be making substantial profit on the first flight. Basically, we’ll break even by selling a third of the payload.”

The X Prize competitors might all be beaten by landers and rovers that China, Russia and India plan to send up over the next couple of years. But those fall more in the mold of traditional, government-built science probes.

While NASA had wanted to send astronauts back to the Moon, its program was canceled last year, a victim of budget cuts and shifting priorities. But it has awarded $500,000 each to Moon Express, Astrobotic and a third competitor, Rocket City Space Pioneers, the first installments of up to $30 million that it will contribute to the X Prize efforts.

George Xenofos, manager of NASA’s Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data program, said he expected one or more teams to make it to the Moon. “It’s definitely not the technical issues that’s stopping them,” he said.

The contestants’ goals do not appear to face legal hurdles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 100 nations, bars countries from claiming sovereignty over any part of the Moon, but does not prevent private companies from setting up shop. As for mining the Moon, it could fall under similar legal parameters as fishing in international waters.

Although some orbiting spacecraft have crashed into the Moon in recent years, 35 years have passed since anything from Earth made a soft landing there. To some people, this looks like an overdue invitation.

“It’s probably the biggest wealth creation opportunity in modern history,” said Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist turned entrepreneur and now a co-founder of Moon Express. While Moon Express might initially make money by sending small payloads, the big fortune would come from bringing back platinum and other rare metals, Dr. Pell said.

“Long term, the market is massive, no doubt,” he said. “This is not a question of if. It’s a question of who and when. We hope it’s us and soon.”

Link: nytimes.com

And in another piece of news worth mentioning astronomers found a reservoir of water measuring 140 trillion times the earth's ocean water in space. The reservoir of water is the most distant ever discovered in the universe, said two teams of researchers.

The water surrounds a giant feeding black hole called a "quasar" and is located more than 12 billion light-years away. The giant black hole powers the quasar which gradually consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. It also emits enormous amounts of energy.

Astronomers studied a quasar named APM 08279+5255, where the black hole is 20 billion times greater than the sun and discovered water vapor around the black hole extending hundreds of light-years in size.

NASA scientist Matt Bradford said, "The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water. It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."

Link: ibtimes.com

Massive Croc Found: Steve Irwin Would Be Proud

Caught alive after a three-week hunt, an allegedly 21-foot-long (6.4-meter-long) saltwater crocodile—the biggest crocodile ever caught in the Philippines—is restrained on September 4, according to the Associated Press.

The 2,369-pound (1,075-kilogram) crocodile is suspected of attacking several people and killing two. The animal, named Lolong, survived capture and is being held in a temporary enclosure in the village of Consuelo, near Bunawan township.

Federal wildlife officials are trying to confirm whether the reptile is the largest crocodile ever captured, Theresa Mundita Lim, of the Philippines' Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau, told the AP.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists a 17.97-foot-long (5.48-meter-long), Australian-caught saltwater crocodile as the largest in captivity.

Yet herpetologist Brady Barr, host of the National Geographic Channel show Dangerous Encounters, said such claims rarely check out. (The National Geographic Society part-owns the Channel and wholly owns National Geographic News.)

"I'd be surprised if it was truly six meters," Barr told National Geographic News, adding that a scientist would need to verify the claim.

Alligator biologist Allan Woodward agreed. "There's never been a crocodile longer than approximately 18 feet [5.5 meters]," said Woodward, of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission."That would be an exceptional jump."

As for whether the crocodile is the perpetrator of the attacks, it's impossible to know unless the animal is killed and cut open, Barr said. Officials did induce the animal to vomit, which produced no human remains.

"It's great they didn't kill it," Barr said. "That's commendable [and] very rare."

link: news.nationalgeographic.com

Apple: The End of an Era

Steve Jobs has spent his career challenging conventions about personal computing. He's transformed an industry and changed the way we think about technology. The ailing tech visionary who founded Apple Inc., said he was unable to continue as chief executive of the technology giant and handed the reins to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.

Apple said Mr. Jobs submitted his resignation to the board of directors on Wednesday and "strongly recommended" that the board name Mr. Cook as his successor. Mr. Jobs, 56 years old, has been elected chairman of the board and Mr. Cook will join the board, effective immediately, the company said.

"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know," Mr. Jobs said in his resignation letter. "Unfortunately, that day has come."

Art Levinson, chairman of Genentech and an Apple board member, said in a statement that the board "has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO." He added that Mr. Jobs will "continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration."

After a brief halt, Apple's shares slid 5.13% to $355.70 in after-hours trading, after closing at $376.18, up $2.58, at 4 p.m. on the Nasdaq Stock Market Wednesday.

Mr. Cook, 50, has been widely considered as the leading candidate to succeed Mr. Jobs, who has been on medical leave since January. The 13-year Apple veteran, who joined the company shortly after Mr. Jobs took over for the second time in 1997, has been running the day-to-day operations during this period as he has done during two prior medical leaves of absence by Mr. Jobs in the last seven years.

The announcement likely marks the end of one of the most extraordinary careers in U.S. business history. Mr. Jobs not only co-founded Apple—and the personal computer industry along with it—but decades later played a central role in reshaping the music, movie, animation, and mobile-phone businesses.

"Steve Jobs is the world's magic man. No compromises," wrote John Sculley, who led the company from 1983 for a decade, in an email. Mr. Sculley was recruited by Mr. Jobs in 1983 as CEO, but ousted him in 1985 after a power struggle.

Mr. Jobs—widely known for his mercurial, demanding management style—drove his company relentlessly to make products that consumers lusted for, unveiling them in heavily rehearsed events that earned him a reputation as high-tech's greatest showman.

It earned him a fortune that he said he wasn't interested in. The company pays Mr. Jobs a salary of $1 a year. He also has Apple shares worth about $2.1 billion, and is the single largest Disney shareholder, with stock worth about $4.4 billion.

Even after his health began to fail, Mr. Jobs insisted on turning up at key product launches—including the introduction of the iPad 2 earlier this year, where he was greeted with a sustained standing ovation.

"I think his brilliance has been well-documented, but what gets forgotten is the bravery with which he's confronted his illness," said Howard Stringer, Sony Corp.'s chief executive. "For him to achieve this much success under these circumstances doubles his legacy."

Perhaps more than any other CEO, Mr. Jobs has developed a cult-like following among both employees and customers who hang on his every word at press conferences and vigorously defend the executive from those who might question his products.

Former Apple employees say he created a unique culture inside the company, and affected how other Silicon Valley companies think about innovation.

"Steve inspired an entire generation of entrepreneurs and creative people to think about things in terms of innovation and design," said Dave Morin, the CEO of start-up Path Inc. and an Apple employee from 2003 to 2006.

The announcement focuses attention on the health of Mr. Jobs, who was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant two years ago.

Mr. Jobs hasn't commented on it since he said in a letter in January that he was taking another leave of absence to "focus on my health." He appeared thin at Apple's annual developers' conference in June.

People familiar with the matter say Mr. Jobs has continued to be active at Apple and closely involved in the company's product strategy. To the extent his health permits, some Apple watchers think that involvement is likely to continue even after Mr. Cook takes the CEO post.

Some Apple employees Wednesday were in a state of disbelief, people familiar with the situation said. One person noted that Mr. Jobs had been seen less frequently around the company's campus lately.

The transition to Mr. Cook has been widely expected and many are determined to move forward, starting with the launch of the fifth-generation iPhone, which is expected in October.

Mr. Cook, an Alabama native who previously worked for International Business Machines Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp., is known for his operational acumen. He was instrumental in wringing out inefficiencies in Apple's manufacturing and setting up its supply chain in China.

Since then, he has gradually increased his responsibilities, becoming chief operating officer in 2005. He has also ably led the company during Mr. Jobs's absences in the past.

Unlike Mr. Jobs, Mr. Cook has tended to stay outside of the spotlight apart from quarterly earnings calls with analysts.

Mr. Cook faces a daunting task succeeding Mr. Jobs, who proved his managerial mettle by bringing Apple back from near bankruptcy when he returned to it in 1997. And Mr. Jobs relentlessly pushed through his vision of the tech business, reviving the Macintosh computer business and developing new products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Apple faces a particular challenge in that Mr. Jobs has had an unusually strong influence in setting Apple's corporate culture and strategy, said Charles O'Reilly, a management expert at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business "Great companies rarely go from strength to strength," he said.

"I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it," Mr. Jobs wrote in his letter Wednesday. "And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

"I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you," he added.

The news of Mr. Jobs's resignation quickly became the talk of the Internet. Overwhelmed with traffic, the blog Cult of Mac temporary went offline. "This thing is melting down," said editor Leander Kahney, about an hour after the news broke on Wednesday.

Wall Street reacted with little surprise. "This was a 'when' not 'if' moment," said Mike Binger a fund manager for Thrivent Asset Management in Minneapolis, which owns Apple shares. He added that he had no plans to change his holdings, saying that the stock is still "really cheap for the kind of operating fundamentals they've been putting up."

The value of the company, however, has been skyrocketing as the success of products like the iPhone, iPad and ultra-thin Macintosh computers keep setting records. At close to $350 billion, Apple is second only Exxon Mobil in market valuationat the moment, recently eclipsing the oil giant for a brief period.

Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer for Solaris Asset Management in New York, which holds Apple shares said he has confidence in Apple's executive team even without Mr. Jobs, but is hoping for more details on who will be Apple's "creative force" now that he is gone.

While Mr. Jobs's resignation is a blow to Apple, the company has a solid pipeline of products, churning out new versions of its Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPods every year.

A person familiar with the situation has said in the past that the board spends most of its time discussing product development and there is a roadmap in place for the next several years. Its next iPhone is expected in mid-October.

"This definitely marks the end of an era," said Michael Gartengerg, an analyst for Gartner, but he added that "there's much more to Apple than Steve Jobs."

(link: www.wsj.com)

Time Trave Impossible: Blame It On The Photons

Sorry scifi nerds, looks like the Tardis is just an old call box after all.

Science fiction will never be the same again. Apparently time travel has now been proven to be impossible and it's all thanks to those little balls of light, photons.

The prospect of time travel seems unlikely, according to the latest findings by physicists who confirmed the ultimate speed limit of photons, which are packets of light.

The universe's ultimate speed limit is the speed of light in a vaccum. Recent experiments suggested that single photons might beat it and allow for the prospect of time travel, but now findings indicate that individual photons are also limited to the vacuum speed limit.

Einstein's theory of special relativity maintains that an event's effect cannot precede its cause by traveling faster than light. A violation of this causality would permit time travel.

The limit in a vacuum is a fixed number - about 300,00km per second, but the speed of light can vary.

"By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon," said professor Shengwang Du of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In conclusion, photons cannot time travel, and moving information around at faster-than-light speeds is not possible. But that doesn't mean that time travel is entirely ruled out.

Source: www.ibtimes.com

Resource: http://physics.aps.org

Ok, so it's not ruled out. It just means that it's impossible if you are made of matter. So, now all we have to do is figure out how to turn matter into anti-matter or harness the energy of a star, find a black hole, if they exist, toss ourselves in and use that harnessed energy to propel us into another time and space hoping that DS9, Stargate and Sliders got it right.

Volcanoes On The Moon: Now Someone Can Write the Book "Journey To The Center Of The Moon"

A Map Showing The Location Of The Possible Volcanoes
If possible, volcanoes on the moon just became even more awesome.

According to NASA's Lunar Science Center, scientists have recently discovered what they believe to be dormant silicate volcanoes on the far side of the moon. While the surface of the moon is littered with more common basaltic volcanoes, the type that "ooze" magma, this new find suggests a different type of activity.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) discovered the now dead volcanoes, according to Space.com. Previous lunar exploration missions had hinted at this type of activity on the moon, but it wasn't until this find that the presence of silicate volcanoes could be confirmed.

The find tells scientists a lot more than was previously known about volcanic activity of the Earth's largest satellite.

“To find evidence of this unusual composition located where it is, and appearing to be relatively recent volcanic activity is a fundamentally new result and will make us think again about the Moon’s thermal and volcanic evolution,” Bradley Jolliff, PhD, research professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis said.

Apparently these volcanoes, located on the far, or "dark," side of the moon present some of the youngest volcanic activity predicted to have taken place on the moon, occurring about three to four billion years ago, according to NASA.

Wired reports that, despite the cool finding, NASA's plans to return to the moon were canceled in 2010, and thus "Sadly, we probably won't get a chance to take a hands-on look anytime soon."

resource: www.huffingtonpost.com

Godspeed: The Last Space Shuttle Launch

The last space shuttle of the US manned space program launched today and with conditions that couldn't have been better. The US government has shut down a 50 year program that "launched" us into a new era of technology and discovery. The shuttle program was started in 1981 and has launched 132 shuttles into space including the final one this morning. I am not, of course, a NASA engineer nor a politician, but I think it’s a huge mistake to give up such a huge stake in space exploration. The reasons I have heard are everything from financial issues, to changing technology even to conspiracy type ideas like the powers that be switching world powers... though I don't put much stock in the latter. No matter the reason I find it sad that so many people who have such a life investment in the program are just let go and forced to hang up their childhood dreams of space. This of course doesn't mean that we are no longer researching space it’s just no longer going to be seen as the final frontier by the US government.

NASA is adjusting to what they are calling a commercial space flight program where small companies will be able to pick up the slack that NASA leaves behind. This will undoubtedly redefine the astronaut and what space travel will look like. If anything good was to come of this I suppose it would be that a new industry will be created supplying new jobs. Who knows... maybe this will be the beginning of public space transportation here in the states. Still, I am sad to see a legacy of NASA come to an end.

Read an article at www.thenewamerican.com for more on the last shuttle launch.