Though the popular conception has been that "money can't buy happiness," studies have shown that wealth can play a role in enhancing happiness.    A study of American woman by a Princeton University psychologist says money doesn't buy happiness - not caring about having no money apparently makes the difference.

Women who concentrated on financial matters were less likely to be happy with their lives, according to Talya Miron-Shatz, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, even though they had plenty of money by conventional standards.

Conversely, those who didn't fixate on finances like retirement savings, tuition for college or simply making ends meet, reported being the happiest of the group.

A new computerized method of testing could help world health officials better identify flu vaccines that are effective against multiple strains of the disease. Rice University scientists who created the method say tests of data from bird flu and seasonal flu outbreaks suggest their method can better gauge the efficacy of proposed vaccines than can tests used today.

Synchronized, goal-directed actions are nothing new; that concept is the foundation of civilization.   But it goes much deeper than previously realized, according to research in BMC Neuroscience.    It isn't just voluntary cooperation that happens, sometimes it is at the unconscious brain level.

A new study shows that when musicians play along together it isn't just their instruments that are working together, it is happening at the brain wave level also.  The research details how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do.

Want to see a collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with a  millions of times the mass of the sun?

You're in luck.   NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently caught that very thing.   The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

Sixty-one teams from Southern California, Arizona, Brazil and Chile faced off in the Los Angeles regional FIRST Robotics Competition on March 13 and 14. JPL sponsored nine of the schools in this annual engineering and technology contest held at the Long Beach Convention Center. 

The teams from Centinela Valley Union High School District, Lawndale; Atascadero High School, Atascadero; and the NASA-sponsored Bishop Alemany High School, Mission Hills, won the regional competition and will compete in the FIRST championship competition in Atlanta, from April 16-19. Chaminade College Preparatory, in West Hills, won the competition's highest award, the Regional Chairman's Award, and will also go to Atlanta. 

A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated a site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.  The sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.