your science briefing for 04.18.2025

Why money doesn't buy long term happiness, Big Tech wants all of our electricity for vaporware, the world's faster shutter speed, and more...

Does money buy happiness is one of the great debates of our time. We can argue that studies show it does up to a certain point, and we can also point to some very greedy, miserable people with immense wealth. A new study looking at long term attitudes on money and personal wealth says that the relationship is actually very complicated. It’s obviously nice to have a decent financial situation, but income seemed just as critical. So, if you’re happy about where you are now, but worry about your future income, you will be unhappy no matter how well off you may feel now. So, in short, yes, money can buy some happiness, but knowing if it will last will always be a concern… (PsyPost)

extra: What happens when you buy a little too much happiness because you have so much money that you can afford literally anything you could ever want? Turns out that at some point, having an absurd degree of wealth warps you in very unflattering and problematic ways unless there are checks, balances, and accountability.

Look, just because a superhuman AI is more of an obsession of a cult of nerds mostly in Silicon Valley than a real thing, and we’re most likely going to end up with crappy AI that justifies the whims of plutocrats given our current trajectory, doesn’t mean we’re not being asked to give up 99% of all power generation capacity for it. Yes, you read that right. We’re expected to give the owners of AI startups $7 trillion and 99% of our electricity to make their fever dreams a reality… (Futurism)

If you’ve ever been sailing across an ocean, you’ve experienced two things. The first is a pitch black darkness that falls on you like a shroud soon after the sun sets. And the second are strange, distant glows that can stretch for thousands of kilometers. Those glows are caused by bioluminescent life, which is something we already know. But the mechanics of how these lights could be so large and bright that astronauts could spot them from orbit under the right conditions is still shrouded in mystery. So, researchers are working on tools to predict where the sea will glow next and send a vessel to help answer these questions and learn more about the cycles of the deep sea… (CSU)

Here’s a question for you. If our bodies tend to settle into a metabolic equilibrium, how do people become obese? One thought is that it’s a gradual process, like overeating a lot of processed foods for years on end while having a sedentary lifestyle. But a brand new study suggests that weight gain can also be very rapid and come on in moments of massive disruption in our lives, with more disruptions causing us to potentially pack on more weight by not letting our bodies settle into their equilibrium and give us time and a chance to properly adjust and get it under control… (Nature)

Scientists love slow motion videos because they can reveal amazing inner mechanics of different materials and events. Cameras custom built for this kind of work capture between 8,500 and 2.5 million frames per second. But what if you want to study very small and very fast things, like atoms and molecules? You’ll need a much, much faster camera. Which is why researchers built the vsPDF camera which captures molecules in complex materials with a shutter speed of one trillion frames per second. This is not the fastest shutter speed on record — that belongs to a 156 trillion fps system at INRS in Canada called SCARF — but it still gives engineers and material scientists adequate insight into exotic new alloys and molecular arrangements… (ScienceAlert)