News Cut: May 30, 2012 Archive

Does marriage make you happier?

Posted at 3:03 PM on May 30, 2012 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Science

Is it better to be deliriously giddy over a short period of time, are reservedly happy over a long period of time?

Perhaps the answer should determine whether marriage is for you.

A study out today says people are not happier when they get married than when they were single, but over time, married people are happier than if they had stayed single.

Michigan State researcherStevie C.Y. Yap set out to determine whether personality helps people adapt to major life events including marriage, a news release from the university says.

The answer, essentially, was no: Personality traits such as conscientiousness or neuroticism do not help people deal with losing a job or having a baby.

"Past research has suggested that personality is important in how people react to important life events," Yap said. "But we found that there were no consistent effects of personality in how people react and adapt to these major events."

In general, similar-aged participants who did not get married showed a gradual decline in happiness as the years passed.

Those who were married, however, largely bucked this trend. It's not that marriage caused their satisfaction level to spike, Yap noted, but instead kept it, at least, stable.

(2 Comments)

This is how the world will end

Posted at 3:11 PM on May 30, 2012 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Science

One thing about the NASA public relations department: it doesn't overplay events.

Here's today's news release:

On Thursday, May 31, at 3:00 p.m. EDT NASA will host an informal discussion for the general public with astronomers about new Hubble Space Telescope observations that allow them to predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our entire galaxy, sun, and solar system.

By "next major cosmic event," they're talking about the end of the world. Many worlds, actually.

Using data from the Hubble space telescope, scientists apparently have determined the answer to the long standing question about whether the Andromeda galaxy will have a head-on collision with the Milky Way.

Bad news: The answer is "yes."

It will happen billions of years from now but when it does, it will look something like this:

It will be an amazingly beautiful result, even if all life as we know it will be over.

(Visualization By : Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute)

(8 Comments)