Happiness is lowest at midlife, a crocodile missing link and no lack of earthlike planets in space

Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.

Study Finds Happiness Lowest at Midlife

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): The road to happiness is U-shaped. New research this week has found that happiness over the course of a lifetime follows a universal curve in which the greatest bliss occurs at the beginning and end of life, while misery dominates middle age. The pattern was consistent around the globe, according to the report, which examined social survey data on 2 million people in 80 countries, including the United States. The study, conducted by economists Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, set out to look at the relationship between age and happiness.

Fossil Crocodile From Brazil May Be "Missing Link"

from National Geographic News: (Associated Press) - The fossil of a land-bound reptile that could be a link between prehistoric and modern-day crocodiles was put on public display for the first time [Thursday]. Paleontologist Felipe Mesquita de Vasconcellos presented the 80-million-year-old predator, dubbed Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi, during a news conference at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The remains were found in 2004 near the small Brazilian city of Monte Alto, about 215 miles northwest of Sao Paulo. The 5.5-foot-long Montealtosuchus was a long-limbed and extremely agile animal that roamed arid terrain in what is now the Brazilian countryside, de Vasconcellos said.

Study Suggests No Dearth of Earths

from Science News: Supposedly, there's no place like home. But a new study suggests that earthlike planets orbit or are forming around many, if not most, nearby sunlike stars, providing places where life might have gained a foothold. That conclusion comes from an infrared survey of some 300 stars similar in mass to the sun and ranging in age from a youthful 3 million years to a middle-aged 3 billion. Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Mike Meyer of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues surveyed those stars and their surroundings at an infrared wavelength of 24 micrometers. In many cases more radiation was emitted than the stars themselves could have produced, indicating the presence of dust ... a sign of possible terrestrial planet formation ...

A 'Bold' Step to Capture an Elusive Gas Falters

from the New York Times (Registration Required): Capturing heat-trapping emissions from coal-fired power plants is on nearly every climate expert's menu for a planet whose inhabitants all want a plugged-in lifestyle. So there was much enthusiasm five years ago when the Bush administration said it would pursue "one of the boldest steps our nation has taken toward a pollution-free energy future" by building a commercial-scale coal-fire plant that would emit no carbon dioxide - the greenhouse gas that makes those plants major contributors to global warming. That bold step forward stumbled last week. With the budget of the so-called FutureGen project having nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion, and the government responsible for more than 70 percent of the eventual bill, the administration completely revamped the project.

Acceptance Slow for Bush's Space Plan

from the Washington Post (Registration Required): Four years after President Bush called for Americans to return to the moon and then voyage on to Mars, NASA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to design, build and test the spacecraft that would make it possible. But the effort has yet to capture the public's imagination as the Apollo project did in the 1960s, something tacitly acknowledged recently when NASA hired a New York advertising firm to help "brand" the program, now dubbed Constellation. Moreover, some top space exploration advocates, policy experts and scientists, including some who initially supported the program, are questioning whether it can ever achieve its goals at a price taxpayers will accept.

Boats to Try to Prevent Hooking Seabirds

from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required): ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Associated Press) - Albatross looking for a free meal on the high seas often pay the price of being killed or injured going after baited hooks. Now, fishing fleets around the world have agreed to use measures to prevent hooking albatross and other seabirds whose numbers are declining. The measures -- using streamer lines to drive birds away from boats' sterns as miles of baited hooks are being set as well as dying bait blue to conceal it in dark water -- will go into effect this year in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Amazon Research Raises Tough Questions

from the San Francisco Examiner: MANAUS, Brazil (Associated Press) - Julio Tota stood atop a 195-foot steel tower in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, watching "rivers of air" flowing over an unbroken green canopy that stretched as far as the eye could see. These billows of fog showed researcher Tota how greenhouse gases emitted by decaying organic material on the forest floor don't rise straight into the atmosphere, as scientists had supposed. Instead, they hover and drift - confounding scientific efforts to unlock the secrets of the world's largest remaining tropical wilderness. "What we've learned is the Amazon rain forest is much more fragile and much more complex than we had first imagined," Tota said. "My research is pretty specific. It's aimed at showing why all our measurements are probably off."

Securing the Cities No Easy Task

from the Washington Post (Registration Required): NEW YORK -- A New York City Police Department helicopter with an ultra-sensitive radiation detector affixed to its tail whipped through a wintry sky over Lower Manhattan last month, hunting block by block through the concrete canyons of Wall Street for a black SUV containing the components of a homemade radiological "dirty bomb." The 30-minute training exercise failed to detect a deliberately planted chunk of radioactive cesium-137, a material that -- if dispersed by an explosive -- could paralyze the nation's financial nerve center. With time running short, police operators blamed technical glitches, and the pilot turned back to a West Side landing pad. The test sweep ... underscores the government's determination to prove this year that it can detect and disrupt nuclear threats to major cities.

Potentially Harmful Chemical in Baby Products

from ABC News: Some environmental medicine experts worry that parents using any one of dozens of baby products could be exposing their children to chemicals that could hurt their reproductive ability later on in life. In a new study, University of Washington researchers found evidence of chemicals called phthalates in the urine of 163 infants exposed to a baby product such as shampoo, lotion or powder. The study was released Monday in the journal Pediatrics. However, there still exists little evidence that phthalates -- manmade chemicals that are found in many products from tubing to cosmetics -- cause any harm to humans. Still, the researchers noted that the fact that evidence of the substances were found in the urine of more than 80 percent of the babies in the study suggests more should be done to identify products that contain these chemicals.

NASA to Broadcast The Beatles into Deep Space

from the Christian Science Monitor: In astronomical terms, it won't be long: In the year 2439, residents of the Polaris star system, if there are any, will be treated to a transmission of The Beatles 1968 song, "Across the Universe," courtesy of NASA. At 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4, NASA, with a little help from its friends at Spain's space agency, will beam an mp3 of the four-minute song from a giant space antenna near Madrid. From there, the transmission will begin its long and winding road to Polaris. Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the recording of the song. It's NASA's birthday too; the transmission will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the agency's founding, as well as the 50th anniversary of Explorer 1, the first US satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, a network of antennas around the world that transmits and receives signals from distant stars.