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My picks from ScienceDaily

By clock on February 19, 2009.

Buying Experiences, Not Possessions, Leads To Greater Happiness:

Can money make us happy if we spend it on the right purchases? A new psychology study suggests that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them.

Surfing The Net Helps Seniors Cope With Pain:

Surfing the Internet could provide significant relief for seniors with chronic pain, according to new research reported in The Journal of Pain, published by the American Pain Society.

Multilingualism Brings Communities Closer Together:

Learning their community language outside the home enhances minority ethnic children's development, according to research led from the University of Birmingham. The research, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, found that attending language classes at complementary schools has a positive impact on students.

Loneliness Affects How The Brain Operates:

Social isolation affects how people behave as well as how their brains operate, a study at the University of Chicago shows. The research, presented February 15 at a symposium, "Social Emotion and the Brain," at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first to use fMRI scans to study the connections between perceived social isolation (or loneliness) and activity in the brain. Combining fMRI scans with data relevant to social behavior is part of an emerging field examining brain mechanisms--an approach to psychology being pioneered at the University of Chicago.

Maintaining Balance And Listening At Same Time May Become More Difficult For Older Adults:

Listening to a conversation or audio book while walking or exercising sounds simple enough for most people, but it may become more difficult for people in their upper 70s and above, according to new research from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Engineering Graduate Student Narrows Gap Between High-resolution Video And Virtual Reality:

With their immersive 3D capabilities, virtual-reality environments (VEs) provide the kind of intense visual experience that two-dimensional digital televisions could never to live up to. But digital TVs outperform VEs in one important way: They can play high-resolution video in real-time without a hitch, while VEs have trouble rendering the data-heavy video clips at a constant frame rate.

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Brain and Behavior

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