Having a husband creates an extra seven hours a week of housework for women, according to a University of Michigan study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families.

For men, the picture is very different: A wife saves men from about an hour of housework a week.

The findings are part of a detailed study of housework trends, based on 2005 time-diary data from the federally-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics, conducted since 1968 at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

Common sense says that we are happier when we get more money to spend on ourselves. At least, that’s what passes for commonsense in modern capitalistic societies, from the United States to China.  Indeed, when Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and at Harvard Business School asked a bunch of their students (the usual subjects in social science studies), that’s exactly what they found: students thought they would be happier getting $20 than $5, and that they would be happier spending the money on themselves than on others.

Turns out, the students were spectacularly wrong.

Research over the past several years has steadily contradicted the capitalistic assumption about human nature. For instance, it is well known that there is only a weak correlation between income level and self-reported happiness across the globe, with the relationship plateauing (meaning that additional money does not increase happiness) at surprisingly low levels of income. And yet, people keep playing the lottery, or its white collar equivalent, the stock market. Why?

The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research has a couple of interesting things in the works, the first being next generation media storage. Dutch researcher Alexander le Fèbre has demonstrated that a field-emission current signal can be used to arrange the position of thousands of nanometre-sharp needles. These probes can be applied to write and read in new storage media with an extremely high density, using bits on a nanometre scale.

The development of the hard disk is reaching its technical limits because the entire disk is served by just a single head so the capacity of the disk and the reading and writing speed cannot expand much more in the future. Research into a memory based on probes from the University of Twente’s MESA+ research institute means able to control the position of each separate probe - essential for realizing a system with extremely high densities.

In baseball's golden age, pitchers had a higher mound and threw more complete games but careers were shorter. As salaries continue to rise there is greater concern about protecting the investments. A new study involving several Major League Baseball pitchers indicates that the height of the pitcher’s mound can affect the athlete’s throwing arm motion, which may lead to potential injuries because of stress on the shoulder and elbow.

The study was led by William Raasch, M.D., associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who also is the head team physician for the Milwaukee Brewers. Major League Baseball funded the study in an effort to help prevent injuries among professional baseball players.

A few days ago the internet was abuzz with shocking headlines because the gentleman behind 'virtual water', professor John Anthony Allan of King’s College London, got an award from a water conservation group, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) for his work on advocating water conservation. Reading the news clippings about it, you'd have thought it was a Nobel prize for perpetual motion.

Perpetual motion is a good analogy. Generally, if you see something too ridiculous to be true, it's probably not true. A few weeks ago, for example, a VA Tech grad student got a prize for a 'gravity lamp' that was just the kind of alcohol-and-magic-fueled hocus-pocus that sets the internet on fire. It was green energy and cool tech all rolled into one. Except it didn't exist. Rather than being able to power a household bulb for hours, even an unsuitably-large one could only power a tiny 0.1-watt LED for 45 minutes. It's just physics.

So a few days ago people were aghast and outraged when they saw a number stating that 34 gallons of 'virtual water' went into a cup of coffee. I understand their panic. That means we only have about 9,588,235,294,117,647 cups of coffee left before all the water is gone.(1)

The tests for testosterone doping used in professional and amateur sports may routinely be confounded by a common genetic variation, according to a new study. Unless this variation is accounted for, current testing methods could implicate innocent athletes and allow cheaters to go undetected.

“Genetic factors may play an important role in the accuracy and sensitivity of testosterone doping tests,” said Jenny J. Schulze, Ph.D, of the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, and lead author of the study. “This is of interest not only for combating androgen doping in sports, but also for detecting and preventing androgen abuse in society.”

"March Madness", the annual tournament in college basketball to determine the national champion, impacts more than just sports fans. College basketball teams that make this year’s cut for the 'Sweet 16' may boost the number of students applying to their schools by as much as 3 percent next year, while the winner of the tournament, may see a 7 percent to 8 percent jump in applications, according to a new study.

Jaren Pope, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at Virginia Tech and his brother Devin Pope, an assistant professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, have co-authored a paper in Southern Economic Journal that finds a link between college sports success and college admissions around the country.

Due to a recent whirlwind bout of touring, I was excited to do nothing but plunk on my couch with the dog and watch many, many hours of pro sports. Ski videos would be nice, but really what I was looking for was a good cricket match — completely incomprehensible and hopefully extending across multiple days. Contract bridge and international chess competed for close-second.

This has happened before but, if you have small children and/or a pregnant spouse, you know your ability to sink into a vegetative stupor is tempered by relationship politics. This, I think, is not an issue relevant to me alone.