Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
A new study from researchers at the University of Ottawa shows honey to be effective in killing bacteria that cause chronic sinusitis [which] affects millions of people every year. In chronic sinusitis, the mucous membranes in the sinus cavities become inflamed, causing headaches, stuffy nose, and difficulty breathing. Though it can be caused by allergies, chronic sinusitis can also be caused by bacteria that colonize in the nose and sinuses. That's where honey may help. Researchers, led by Tala Alandejani, MD, at the University of Ottawa, tested two honeys, manuka and sidr. [They] singled out three particularly nasty bacteria: two strains of staph bacteria ... and one called Pseudomonas aeriginosa. The two types of honey were effective in killing the bacteria. Even bacteria growing in a biofilm, a thin, slimy layer formed by bacteria that affords resistance to antibiotics, were susceptible to honey. The researchers also found that the two types of honey worked significantly better than an antibiotic against [the staph bacterias]. Scientists hope the results can help lead to a new treatment for people with chronic sinusitis.
Note: One note of caution: Infants one year or younger should never be given honey because it could become toxic in their underformed intestinal tract, causing illness or even death.
The world's first commercial power plant converting the energy of sea waves into electricity [has] started working off Portugal's coast ... in a project that should be expanded nearly 10-fold over the next few years. Three articulated steel "sea-snakes" moored to the seabed three miles off Portugal's northern coast, each about the length of a nuclear submarine, generate a total of 2.25 megawatts, enough to supply 1,500 households with electricity. "It's logged into the national grid, which makes it the world's first commercial wave power project," said Anthony Kennaway, a spokesman for Babcock and Brown investment firm which runs the Agucadoura project in northern Portugal. "We hope that in 15 years wave power will be where wind is now, that is extremely competitive. Portugal could be for wave power what Denmark was for wind," Kennaway said. Renewable energy, including water dams, accounts for 40 percent of power consumption in Portugal. Some experts say wave energy could meet up to 20 percent of the country's needs in the future. A total of 25 semi-submerged "sea-snakes" should be installed in the next few years, boosting the ... capacity to 21 MW, Kennaway said. The machines, each 140 meters (yards) long and 3.5 meters in diameter, are positioned head-on towards the waves so that its sections move with the waves. Each joint ... contains a hydraulic pump, which pumps high-pressure liquid through motors that in their turn drive power generators. The energy is then transmitted to a substation on shore via subsea cables.
Note: For lots more on new energy inventions from reliable sources, click here.
The market was 500 trades away from Armageddon on Thursday [September 18], traders inside two large custodial banks tell The Post. Had the Treasury and Fed not quickly stepped into the fray that morning with a quick $105 billion injection of liquidity, the Dow could have collapsed. According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening. The Fed's dramatic $105 billion liquidity injection on Thursday (pre-market) was just enough to keep key institutional accounts from following through on the sell orders and starting a stampede of cash that could have brought large tracts of the US economy to a halt. Cracks started to show in money market accounts late Tuesday when shares in one fund, the Reserve Primary Fund - which touted itself as super safe - fell below the golden $1 a share level. By Wednesday, banks sensed a run on their accounts. They started stockpiling cash in anticipation of withdrawals. Banks, which usually keep an average of $2 billion in excess reserves earmarked for withdrawals, pumped that up to an astounding $90 billion, Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrighton ICAP, told The [Wall Street] Journal. And for good reason. By the close of business on Wednesday, $144.5 billion - a record - had been withdrawn. How much money was taken out of money market funds the prior week? Roughly $7.1 billion, according to AMG Data Services. By Thursday, that level ... had grown to $100 billion.
Note: For insight into the banking and financial powers that runs today's governments, click here.
Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates. The study, experts say, raises fears that today's young people may suffer an "epidemic" of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren. Yet investigating dangers to the young has been omitted from a massive Ł3.1m British investigation of the risks of cancer from using mobile phones, launched this year, even though the official Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme – which is conducting it – admits that the issue is of the "highest priority". Despite recommendations of an official report that the use of mobiles by children should be "minimised", the Government has done almost nothing to discourage it. Last week the European Parliament voted by 522 to 16 to urge ministers across Europe to bring in stricter limits for exposure to radiation from mobile and cordless phones, Wi-fi and other devices, partly because children are especially vulnerable to them. They are more at risk because their brains and nervous systems are still developing and because – since their heads are smaller and their skulls are thinner – the radiation penetrates deeper into their brains. David Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York said: "Children are spending significant time on mobile phones. We may be facing a public health crisis in an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone use."
Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.
A federal judge [has] ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president. The decision by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under the Presidential Records Act. The Bush administration's legal position "heightens the court's concern" that some records may not be preserved, said the judge. A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public. Cheney and the other defendants in the case "were only willing to agree to a preservation order that tracked their narrowed interpretation" of the Presidential Records Act, wrote Kollar-Kotelly. The administration, said the judge, wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the suit to cover only the office of the vice president, not Cheney or the other defendants in the lawsuit. The other defendants include the National Archives and the archivist of the United States. The lawsuit stems from Cheney's position that his office is not part of the executive branch of government. This summer, Cheney chief of staff David Addington told Congress the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government, but rather is attached by the Constitution to Congress. In 2003, Cheney asserted that the office of the vice president is not an entity within the executive branch.
Note: For lots more on government secrecy, click here.
There is an epidemic of cancer today. One in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer, often before the age of 65. Since 1940, we have seen in Western societies a marked and rapid increase in common types of cancer. In fact, cancer in children and adolescents has been rising by 1 to 1.5 percent a year since the 1960's. And these are cancers for which there is no screening. For most common cancers - prostate, breast, colon, lung - rates are much higher in the West than in Asian countries. Yet Asians who emigrate to the United States catch up with the rates of Americans within one or two generations. While in Asia, Asians are protected not by their genes, but by their lifestyle. We continue to invest 97 percent of our cancer research funds in better treatments and early detection. Only 3 percent is invested in tackling causes. The World Cancer Research Fund published a report in 2007 concluding that a majority of cancer cases in Western societies could be avoided with life-style measures: 40 percent from changes in diet and physical activity (more vegetables and fruits, less sugar, less red meat, regular walking or the equivalent activity 30 minutes six times per week), 30 percent from smoking cessation, and about 10 percent from reduced alcohol consumption. We now even have data about how specific foods such as broccoli and cabbages, garlic and onions, green tea or the spice turmeric directly help kill cancer cells and reduce the growth of new blood vessels they need to develop into tumors.
Note: The author of this article, Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and a founding board member of Doctors Without Borders, USA, and author of Anticancer - A new way of life. For an excellent, inspiring 10-minute video interview with this doctor, click here.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday opened the way for a bevy of genetically engineered salmon, cows and other animals to leap from the laboratory to the marketplace, unveiling an approval process that would treat the modified creatures like drugs. The guidelines for the first time make explicit the regulatory hoops companies would have to jump through to sell engineered salmon that grow twice as fast as wild fish; pigs with high levels of ... omega-3 fatty acids in their meat; or goats that produce ... proteins, such as insulin, in their milk. Many experts ... say the proposed regulations may not go far enough to protect the public. In particular, they argue that the approval process would be highly secretive to guard the commercial interests of the companies involved, and that the new rules do not place sufficient weight on the potential environmental effect of what many consider to be Frankenstein animals. Animals can't be treated exactly like drugs, said Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety in Washington. "Drugs don't go out and breed with each other. When a drug gets loose, you figure you can control it. When a bull gets loose, it would be harder to corral." The first product likely to be sold under the new rules is a genetically engineered Atlantic salmon produced by Aqua Bounty Technologies Inc. of Waltham, Mass. Inserted genes from two other fish allow it to reach full size in 18 months rather than the normal 30. Aqua Bounty, along with other biotechnology companies, has been pushing the FDA to establish guidelines and hopes to win approval next year.
Note: For a superb survey of the risks to health from genetically modified food organisms, click here.
A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain. What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience? When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases — as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? In my book What Happens When We Die? ... I wanted people to get both angles — not just the patients' side but also the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.
Note: How interesting that when something amazing happened that this cardiologist could not explain, he chose not to think about it rather than consider that there might be some deeper explanation. For an excellent analysis of how this kind of thinking stops scientific progress, see our essay on fluid intellignece available here.
A privacy group filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday against the National Security Agency, President Bush and other officials, seeking to halt what it describes as illegal surveillance of Americans’ telephone and Internet traffic. The lawsuit parallels a legal action brought against the AT&T Corporation in 2006 by the same nonprofit group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, charging that the company gave the N.S.A. access to its communications lines and customer records without proper warrants. Congress derailed that lawsuit this year by passing legislation granting immunity to telecommunications companies that had provided assistance to the agency, though the foundation has said it intends to challenge the constitutionality of the new law. A lawyer with the foundation, Kevin S. Bankston, said the new suit opened a “second front” against a “massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T’s domestic networks and databases of customer records.” When Mr. Bush started the program in late 2001, the N.S.A. began eavesdropping inside the United States without court warrants for the first time since 1978, when Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oversee such intelligence collection. The suit’s plaintiffs are five AT&T customers, but it is filed on behalf of all customers. Like the 2006 suit, it is based in part on information from Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who says he saw what he believed to be equipment installed by the N.S.A. at a company communications hub in San Francisco allowing the agency to filter a huge volume of Internet traffic.
Note: For many disturbing reports from major media sources of threats to privacy, click here.
In the 13 years David Moore worked for the Gallup Poll, he learned that media polls are not used to uncover the “will” or thoughts of the public, but rather to manufacture a “public opinion” that grabs the attention of journalists and can be used to fill media news holes. [Moore] draws on first-hand experience as well as the history of modern media polling practices – focusing particularly on the four most influential polls: New York Times/CBS News, Washington Post/ABC News, Pew Research, and USA Today/Gallup – to reveal the inner-workings of pollsters and the cycle of bias that tends to promote the powerful and suppress dissent in his new book The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls. Analyzing pollsters’ problematic methodology ... Moore reveals how polls distort voters’ election preferences as well as the public’s support for or opposition to government policies. The net result, he says, is that polls give false readings of which candidates voters prefer and what the public wants, which ultimately determines the democratic process. In his new book, Moore shows how polls create a “legitimacy spin cycle.” Those in power frame an issue to favor their position, while the press limits its coverage of sources that might disagree with the administration. Pollsters, in turn, develop surveys to dovetail with the news stories and the people – many of whom have little idea of what is happening beyond the limited information presented to them by the news media – are pressured into answering questions that reinforce the original position of those in power.
Note: For lots more on the many threats to free and fair elections in the United States, click here.
The first large study in humans of a chemical widely used in everyday plastics has found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities. The research, published ... in the Journal of the American Medical Association by a team of British and American scientists, compared the health status of 1,455 men and women with the levels of the chemical, known as BPA, in their urine. The researchers divided the subjects into four statistical groupings according to their BPA levels and found that those in the quartile with the highest concentrations were nearly three times as likely to have cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest levels, and 2.4 times as likely to have diabetes. Higher BPA levels were also associated with abnormal concentrations of three liver enzymes. "This is the nail in the coffin," Frederick vom Saal, a reproductive scientist at the University of Missouri at Columbia and one of the first to document evidence of health problems in rodents exposed to low doses of BPA. "This is a huge deal." More than 100 studies have linked BPA exposure to health effects in animals. The FDA maintains that BPA is safe largely on the basis of two studies funded by the chemical industry, a fact that was repeatedly cited at yesterday's forum. "We're concerned that the FDA is basing its conclusion on two studies while downplaying the results of hundreds of other studies," said Amber Wise of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "This appears to be a case of cherry-picking data with potentially high cost to human health."
Note: For many important reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.
A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon. That's one of the revelations in the new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by The Post's Barton Gellman. Angler is based on hundreds of previously unpublished interviews with present and former Cheney advisers, senior officials in federal agencies, diplomats, judges, military officers, senators and members of Congress. Cheney's accusations about Saddam Hussein, described by former House Majority Leader Richard Armey, ... went far beyond public statements that have been criticized for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability. There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation." Some of the book's most significant news describes a three-month conflict between the Justice Department and the vice president's office over warrantless domestic surveillance. The top White House national security lawyer begins hearing rumors of "the vice president's special program." John B. Bellinger III, who had not been informed of the operation, confronted Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington. "I'm not going to tell you whether there is or isn't such a program," Addington replied, glowering. "But if there were such a program, you'd better go tell your little friends at the FBI and the CIA to keep their mouths shut."
Note: For many powerful exposures of government corruption, click here.
Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century. That's why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing "thought helmets" that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops. Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will "lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone." Improvements in computing power and a better understanding of how the brain works have scientists busy hunting for the distinctive neural fingerprints that flash through a brain when a person is talking to himself. The Army's initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. It's not as far-fetched as you might think: video gamers are eagerly awaiting a crude commercial version of brain wave technology — a $299 headset from San Francisco-based Emotiv Systems — in summer 2009. The military's vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality, let alone implementation. The five-year contract it awarded last month to a coalition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to "decode the activity in brain networks" so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades by thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it.
Note: The US military and intelligence agencies have been conducting and funding research in mind control for decades. Click here for a summary of this research.
A flagship European scheme designed to fight global warming is set to hand hundreds of millions of pounds to some of Britain's most polluting companies, with little or no benefit to the environment. Dozens of multinational firms stand to benefit from the windfall, which comes from the over-allocation of carbon permits under the European emissions trading scheme. The permits are given to companies by the government, and are supposed to account for their carbon pollution over the next five years. But figures published by the European Commission show that many companies have been allocated far too many permits, which they can sell for cash. The scheme is supposed to only distribute as many permits as companies require, with one permit allocated for each tonne of CO2 produced. The figures ... suggest that up to 9m extra annual permits have been allocated to 200 companies across almost all sectors of the British economy, from steel and cement making, to car manufacturing and the food and drink industry. Dozens of household names such as Ford, Thames Water, Astra Zeneca and Vauxhall are among the companies that could benefit. Campaigners say the allocations were ... influenced by industry group lobbying. A source at a major UK car manufacturing firm, which has been allocated more than double the number of permits it needs, told the Guardian they were given out based on "magical logic".
Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government corruption, click here.
For decades, millions of people around the world have reported seeing UFOs hovering in their skies. It is a mystery that science has been unable to solve, and the phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Much of the reporting on this subject holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to ridicule. "UFOs: Seeing is Believing" takes a serious look at the phenomenon in today's world. The 90-minute special includes interviews with scientists searching for proof of life beyond earth and UFO witnesses who claim aliens are already here. Building on the original Peter Jennings report in 2005, David Muir reports on new sightings, as well as NASA's current search for life on Mars. The program follows the entire scope of the UFO experience, from the first famous sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 to the present day. Muir reports on a recent UFO sighting in Stephenville, Texas, where multiple witnesses reported seeing enormous lights moving in strange configurations on the evening of January 8, 2008. He interviews some of the most credible witnesses of the sighting and a radar expert who evaluated their claims and found something surprising in the data. Sophisticated animations approved by the eyewitnesses allow viewers to get a feel for the experience first hand. The special draws on interviews with police officers, pilots, military personnel, scientists and ordinary citizens who give extraordinary accounts of encounters with the unexplained.
Note: For an illuminating two-page summary of evidence for UFOs presented by highly credible government and military professionals, click here.
Just before the Department of Interior's inspector general released reports that laid bare the oil-and-sex scandal in the department's oil royalties office this week, Interior won an annual award from the federal Office of Government Ethics. The inspector general said Wednesday that federal officials in the Mineral Management Service's royalty-in-kind program allegedly were plied with alcohol and expensive gifts from industry representatives, and in some cases had sex and did drugs with them. The Denver-area office takes in roughly $4 billion each year in oil and natural gas reserves from companies drilling on federal and Indian land and offshore. But, on Monday, the Interior Department was praised for "developing a dynamic laminated Ethics Guide for employees" that was a "polished, professional guide" with "colorful pictures and prints which demand employees' attention." The guide, the award noted, was small enough for employees to carry. Interior also was lauded for having held a four-day seminar for its ethics advisors nationwide. It isn't known if those seminars included the royalty office, where investigators found that a former program director was paid more than $30,000 for improper outside work, bought cocaine using a personal check from his office and engaged in an illicit sexual relationship with a subordinate; employees accepted gifts, including sports tickets and vacations, from industry executives; and two former officials, with the help of a supervisor, arranged to get themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting work after they retired.
Note: For many more reports of government corruption from major media sources, click here.
The government wasted millions of dollars on four no-bid contracts it handed out for Hurricane Katrina work, including paying $20 million for a camp for evacuees that was never inspected and proved to be unusable, investigators say. A report by the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, obtained ... by The Associated Press is the latest to detail mismanagement in the multibillion-dollar Katrina hurricane recovery effort, which investigators have said wasted at least $1 billion. The review examined temporary housing contracts awarded without competition to Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel Group Inc., CH2M Hill Companies Ltd. and Fluor Corp. in the days immediately before and after the August 2005 storm that smashed into the U.S. Gulf Coast. It found that FEMA wasted at least $45.9 million on the four contracts that together were initially worth $400 million. FEMA subsequently raised the total amounts for the four contracts twice, both times without competition, to $2 billion and then $3 billion. FEMA did not always properly review the invoices submitted by the four companies, exposing taxpayers to significant waste and fraud, investigators wrote. In many cases, the agency also issued open-ended contract instructions for months without clear guidelines on what work was needed to be done and the appropriate charges. "We question how FEMA determined that the amounts invoiced were allowable and reasonable," the IG report states, warning that its review was limited in scope so that additional waste and fraud might yet to be found.
Note: For many more reports of government corruption from major media sources, click here.
The beginning of the first serious experiments using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider this week has given rise to a welter of fanciful scare stories about the obliteration of the Earth by a pocket black hole or a cascade reaction of exotic particles. Similar predictions have been made around the launch of several other particle physics experiments and even the first atomic weapons tests. Predictions of the world’s end are nothing new though. We’ve picked out 30 of the most memorable apocalypses that never, for one reason or another, quite happened. 1: 2,800BC: The oldest surviving prediction of the world’s imminent demise was found inscribed upon an Assyrian clay tablet which stated: "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common." 4: Mar 25, 970 AD. The Lotharingian computists believed they had found evidence in the Bible that a conjunction of certain feast days prefigured the end times. They were just one of a wide scattering of millennial cults springing up in advance of that first Millennium. The millennial panic endured for at least 30 years after the fateful date had come and gone, with some adjustment made to allow 1,000 years after the crucifixion, rather than the nativity. 8: 1648: Having made close study of the kabbalah, theTurkish rabbi Sabbatai Zevi predicted that the Messiah would make a miraculous return in 1648, and that his name would be Sabbatai Zevi. 9: 1666: A year packed with apocalyptic portent. With a date containing the figures commonly accepted as the biblical Number of the Beast and following a protracted period of plague in England, it was little surprise that many should believe the Great Fire of London to be a herald of the Last Days.
Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom [in Cairo] that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too. “Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.” Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington’s post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq. “Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. “It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis.” Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, [said] “What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that’s why.”
Note: For a two-page summary of many reports from reliable, verifiable sources that highlight unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.
If recent scientific research on happiness -- and there has been quite a bit -- has proved anything, it's that happiness is not a goal. It's a process. Although our tendency to be happy or not is partly inborn, it's also partly within our control. And, perhaps more surprising, happiness brings success, not the other way around. Though many people think happiness is elusive, scientists have actually pinned it down and know how to get it. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want… led controlled studies to determine what behaviors positively affect happiness, and has come up with at least 12 strategies that measurably increase levels. For instance, one strategy she's tested is the practice of gratitude. In her gratitude study, she had a group of 57 subjects express gratitude once a week in a journal. A second group of 58 expressed gratitude in a journal three times a week. And a control group of 32 did nothing. At the end of six weeks, she retested all three groups and found a significant increase in happiness in the first one. She and other researchers also recommend practicing forgiveness, savoring positive moments and becoming more involved in your church, synagogue or religious organization. "Not every strategy fits everyone," she says. "People need to try a few to find which ones work." Although Lyubomirsky likes to let people define happiness for themselves, clinically, she describes it as "a combination of frequent positive emotions, plus the sense that your life is good."
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.