5 simple, science-backed activities that boost happiness - ASU News

Cat people have long been cast as lonely weirdos, devoted to an animal that would probably eat their face if they died on the kitchen floor. Now there’s research suggesting countries with more cats are also happier, so who’s the lonely weirdo now? A new study in PLOS One compared happiness scores across 93 countries with the number of cats living in each one. Countries with more cats generally reported higher happiness.

If you're looking for a boost of household happiness, then you might want to consider getting yourself a cat. In a new study published in PLOS One, an international team of researchers analyzed publicly available data across 93 countries to examine the relationship between happiness scores, domestic cat density, and infection rates of Toxoplasma gondii – the parasite that affects as many as 1 in 3 people and which felines are the primary host of. The researchers wanted to see if having a cat made a difference to happiness, and whether the risk of parasite infection affected that in any way. While T. gondii is usually harmless and symptomless for most people, it can cause problems in more vulnerable groups, and has been linked to anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia. Data from the shaded countries were used in the study. (Borráz-León et al., PLOS One, 2026)Wealth was also included as it's often one of the first factors people consider when it comes to leading a happy and comfortable life.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.