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I performed this "Top 10 Worries" exercise many times over the course of five years. Of my 100 total worries, 60 didn't happen. That's a lot of needless attention, and I could have used that time in better ways.

Even more edifying was that of the 40 worries that did occur, most of them fell into two categories: Either they happened but didn't seem nearly as bad as I worried they would be (such as needing to dip into savings), or they happened but there was nothing I could have done to prevent them (such as whether a friend broke up with his significant other).

The idea that some circumstances we call "bad" can, over time, turn out favorable is a Taoist philosophy I've written about before. Sometimes, there is a big upside to what seemed bad (such as a horrible breakup that leads to finding your true love). And the wisdom of knowing the difference between the things you can and can't change is famously covered by the words of pastor Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. Recognizing those two kinds of needless worries is just as helpful as learning that we too often worry about fiction.

Step two: "Log moments of joy"This means simply saying to yourself -- as you sip a great espresso, laugh at your friend's joke or buy that shirt you've wanted -- "I am having a moment of joy!" When negative things happen to us throughout the day we tend to hold on to them, while the good things are more fleeting and ephemeral. So, by consciously acknowledging the good things, says Meng, we increase our chances that when we reflect on our day, we conclude it was happy one.

I asked psychologist Tom Stafford, who writes the Neurohacks column for BBC Future about the gap. "Squaring what works for you and what the science says is difficult because happiness is a complex object," he told me. "There will be local variations due to individual personality, so we've immediately got a reason for expecting a gap between the science -- which tends to work with group averages -- and any one person's experience."The interesting general question, to me, is when do we trust our experience and when do we listen to science," Stafford added. "Obviously some things we don't need science for ('Does dropping a rock on my foot hurt?'), and some things we do ('Is smoking bad for my health?'). Happiness, I'd argue, is in between these two cases."

To many, Meng's three steps may seem obvious or simplistic. Yet he compared his advice to showing us how to do a single push up or arm curl at the gym. You know it does you good, but you have to do the exercise every day to get results. I may be more experientially convinced than scientifically sated, but it's enough to keep me going to Google's happiness gym and doing those push-ups.

"I feel I have a moral obligation to give the kind of information that I am giving," he said Monday. "People are going to make their own choices, I cannot -- nor anybody -- force people under every circumstance, to do what you'd think is best.

"This was a person's view. Not everybody's happy with Anthony. Not everybody is happy with everybody," he said. "But I will tell you, we have done a job the likes of which nobody has ever done."

Only the women candidates responded with an apology, and both apologized for their occasional anger. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I will ask for forgiveness. I know that sometimes I get really worked up. And sometimes I get a little hot. I don’t really mean to.” Senator Amy Klobuchar said, “Well, I’d ask for forgiveness, any time any of you get mad at me. I can be blunt, but I am doing this because I think it is so important to pick the right candidates here.”

Expressing anger can help you influence others and can help you make change or get your way. But this seems to be truer if you’re a man, especially a white man.

expressions of anger detracted from the credibility and influence of women and African Americans relative to White males. The authors suggest that angry women and angry African Americans are perceived as “emotional” and this is used to discredit them, and consequently their social influence is reduced. 

For uncertainty, they got to choose between a safe bag that always paid out one candy or a risky bag that gave them only a one-in-six chance of more candy. We found lots of variation, especially between the Shuar and the three other communities. Children in the U.S., Argentina, and India behaved similarly, tending to be more patient and more tolerant of uncertainty, while the Shuar showed a very different pattern of behavior. They were more impatient, and warier of uncertainty; they almost never picked the risky bag.

In a follow-up study the next year, we looked within Shuar communities and found the same patterns. Shuar kids living near the cities acted more like Americans than the Shuar kids in the rainforest. Something about living near cities — and perhaps something about industrialization more broadly — seemed to be shaping kids’ behavior

While people can improve their recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made, says Searleman. The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence. Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults, though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to process information more abstractly.

Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability, the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the day.

Australia is one of the great biodiversity hotspots in the world. The island continent was isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, allowing evolution to take strange new paths, and until fairly recently, with little human influence.Around 244 species of mammals are found only in Australia. Before the fires, its great diversity of life was already threatened due to invasive species, habitat destruction, and climate change, according to Australia’s science research agency, CSIRO. Now, ecologists are fearing severe ecological consequences from so much land being burnt at once.

The capsule, named CST-100 Starliner, is part of a NASA program called Commercial Crew, an effort to launch astronauts to the ISS from the U.S. The agency has not had that capability since the space-shuttle program ended in 2011 under the weight of cost, safety, and political factors.

According to NASA officials, after Starliner separated from the rocket, the capsule missed the moment it needed to ignite its engines for a carefully timed and fully automated process known as an orbital insertion burn. Without that step, the spacecraft couldn’t fire the thrusters to shove itself into the correct orbit.

Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.

Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing Space and Launch, said engineers don’t know why the clock went off track. Nicole Mann, who would have made her first trip to space on the next mission, said that the astronauts “train extensively for this type of contingency, and had we been on board, there could have been actions that we could have taken,” such as manually controlling the spacecraft.

Now the future of the program is uncertain, particularly for Boeing. It’s unclear what additional tests NASA might now require from Boeing before letting astronauts fly, including, perhaps, another attempt at an uncrewed mission. The capsule’s failure will certainly reshuffle schedules and could contribute to further delays for Boeing, already under scrutiny for its sluggishness in a recent report from NASA’s inspector general.

The spacecraft failure means yet another cycle of bad news for Boeing. The company has a long history with NASA; it was the prime contractor for the ISS and also worked on the space shuttles. But the company is better known for its airplanes, and in recent months the flaws of its 737 Max, which contributed to two deadly crashes, have put Boeing under intense pressure to prove that its aircraft are safe.

In the coming days, NASA and Boeing teams will review data from Starliner’s short-lived mission. And the space agency will continue its negotiations to buy more seats on the Soyuz, Russia’s transportation system, which can cost as much as $86 million. NASA’s last trip on the Soyuz system is scheduled for April. If neither company’s crew capsule is ready by then, NASA will have to buy more slots to ensure that American astronauts can launch to space.

He hypothesizes that the process involves one or more molecules released by the nervous system — perhaps small RNAs, perhaps something secreted like a hormone. But somehow those germ cells then influence the behavior of the next generation and seem to circumvent the normal need for rde-4 in the production of the small RNAs for chemotaxis in the progeny.

“I believe that today, there is not a single solid paper showing that only small RNAs are involved in epigenetic inheritance,” said Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigenetics researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Zurich who studies the inheritance of trauma in humans and mice. In the mouse model she works with, she knows that small RNAs are not sufficient because if she injects small RNAs alone into fertilized mouse eggs, the resulting animals do not show the RNA-associated trait.

“If we can ingest a chemical from our environment that changes the epigenomes of the egg or sperm, why couldn’t our brain make a similar molecule that does the same thing?”

Clive Wynne, a psychologist specializing in dog behavior, contends that what makes your furry friend special is not its intellect but its ability to bond with you. And not just with you. The dog’s ability to bond across species — with sheep, goats, even (horrors!) cats

Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are considered threatened or endangered in the Northwest’s Columbia basin region

The fish are a keystone food source for other species, and an endangered population of orcas may be starving for lack of enough wild salmon to eat. Many scientists favor removing dams on some rivers to save the orcas and the fish. But the idea faces resistance from government agencies that manage the rivers.

A video of salmon traveling through a long tube went viral in 2019. You probably watched it. But the Whooshh cannon — its actual name — is a serious tool that conservationists are testing not only to help fish migrate, but to contain invasive carp that foul North American waterways.

A New and Improved Table could come in handy: As more superheavy elements are discovered, their behaviors could challenge the integrity of Mendeleev’s memorable chart.

If, eventually, everyone speaks his own language and English, is it only a matter of time before the other languages are forgotten, except by scholars, sentimentalists and curmudgeons?

While the worlds of science, commerce and popular culture unite around English, people are killing each other because they speak different languages.

Language divides as much as does land or blood, and almost as much as religion.

Such is the power of language that it can be used to make division where it barely exists. Ethnically, Belorussians are all but indistinguishable from Russians. Wanting independence from Moscow, the Russians who live around Minsk claim that theirs is a separate language, though many scholars consider it

Under any sort of pressure, they presumed all the statements were true, regardless of their labeling.

How we form beliefs was shaped by the evolutionary push toward efficiency rather than accuracy.

Before language, our ancestors could form new beliefs only through what they directly experienced of the physical world around them. For perceptual beliefs from direct sensory experience, it’s reasonable to presume our senses aren’t lying. Seeing is, after all, believing. In fact, questioning what you see or hear can get you eaten. For our evolutionary ancestors, it was better to be safe than sorry, especially when considering whether to believe that rustling in the grass is a lion.As a result, we didn’t develop a high degree of skepticism when our beliefs were about things we directly experienced, especially when our lives were at stake.

As complex language evolved, we gained the ability to form beliefs about things we hadn’t actually experienced for ourselves–and tended to believe them just as strongly.

The bigger risk is in failing to update our beliefs when new information arises

we still form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information.

The next time you argue with someone about something you believe to be true, step back and ask yourself how you came to this conclusion.