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This book focuses on what makes people happy. The author explains methods for measuring subjective life satisfaction and well-being by discussing economic and sociodemographic factors, as well as the psychological, cultural and political dimensions of personal happiness. Does higher income increase happiness? Are people in rich countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries, happier than those living elsewhere? Does losing one's job make one unhappy? What is the role of genetic endowments inherited from our parents? How important are physical and emotional health to subjective life satisfaction? Do older people tend to be happier, or younger people? Are close social relationships necessary for happiness? Do political conditions, such as respect for human rights, democracy and autonomy, play a part? How can governments contribute to the population's happiness? This book answers these questions on the basis of extensive interdisciplinary research reflecting the current state of knowledge. The book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about the various dimensions of personal well-being beyond the happiness-prosperity connection, as well as to policymakers looking for guidance on how to improve happiness in societies.

Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.

In a 26-year soil warming experiment in a mid-latitude hardwood forest, we documented changes in soil carbon cycling to investigate the potential consequences for the climate system. We found that soil warming results in a four-phase pattern of soil organic matter decay and carbon dioxide fluxes to the atmosphere, with phases of substantial soil carbon loss alternating with phases of no detectable loss. Several factors combine to affect the timing, magnitude, and thermal acclimation of soil carbon loss. These include depletion of microbially accessible carbon pools, reductions in microbial biomass, a shift in microbial carbon use efficiency, and changes in microbial community composition. Our results support projections of a long-term, self-reinforcing carbon feedback from mid-latitude forests to the climate system as the world warms.

Curiously, economists, whose discipline has much to do with human well-being, have shied away from factoring the study of happiness into their work. Happiness, they might say, is an ''unscientific'' concept. This is the first book to establish empirically the link between happiness and economics--and between happiness and democracy. Two respected economists, Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, integrate insights and findings from psychology, where attempts to measure quality of life are well-documented, as well as from sociology and political science. They demonstrate how micro- and macro-economic conditions in the form of income, unemployment, and inflation affect happiness. The research is centered on Switzerland, whose varying degrees of direct democracy from one canton to another, all within a single economy, allow for political effects to be isolated from economic effects. Not surprisingly, the authors confirm that unemployment and inflation nurture unhappiness. Their most striking revelation, however, is that the more developed the democratic institutions and the degree of local autonomy, the more satisfied people are with their lives. While such factors as rising income increase personal happiness only minimally, institutions that facilitate more individual involvement in politics (such as referendums) have a substantial effect. For countries such as the United States, where disillusionment with politics seems to be on the rise, such findings are especially significant. By applying econometrics to a real-world issue of general concern and yielding surprising results, Happiness and Economics promises to spark healthy debate over a wide range of the social sciences.

This paper reviews the current knowledge of microbial processes affecting C sequestration in agroecosystems. The microbial contribution to soil C storage is directly related to microbial community dynamics and the balance between formation and degradation of microbial byproducts. Soil microbes also indirectly influence C cycling by improving soil aggregation, which physically protects soil organic matter (SOM). Consequently, the microbial contribution to C sequestration is governed by the interactions between the amount of microbial biomass, microbial community structure, microbial byproducts, and soil properties such as texture, clay mineralogy, pore-size distribution, and aggregate dynamics. The capacity of a soil to protect microbial biomass and microbially derived organic matter (MOM) is directly and/or indirectly (i.e., through physical protection by aggregates) related to the reactive properties of clays. However, the stabilization of MOM in the soil is also related to the efficiency with which microorganisms utilize substrate C and the chemical nature of the byproducts they produce. Crop rotations, reduced or no-tillage practices, organic farming, and cover crops increase total microbial biomass and shift the community structure toward a more fungal-dominated community, thereby enhancing the accumulation of MOM. A quantitative and qualitative improvement of SOM is generally observed in agroecosystems favoring a fungal-dominated community, but the mechanisms leading to this improvement are not completely understood. Gaps within our knowledge on MOM-C dynamics and how they are related to soil properties and agricultural practices are identified.

A triple supermassive black hole system has been found that shows helical modulation of the large-scale radio jets; this modulation is caused by two of the black holes being tightly coupled as a binary system. Black holes get close in triplets The discovery of a triple supermassive black hole system in a distant (redshift z = 0.39) galaxy provides a rare opportunity to observe what may be the result of galactic mergers. In the four known triple black hole systems, the smallest distance between a pair of black holes is 2.4 kiloparsecs, but the newly discovered triple system includes a 'tight pair' separated by around 140 parsecs. The authors show that the presence of the tight pair is imprinted onto the properties of the large-scale radio jets generated by the black holes, providing a useful way of searching for other tight pairs without the need for extremely high-resolution observations. Six candidate galaxies were surveyed in this study, a 'hit rate' that suggests that tight pairs are more common than was thought. Close-pair binaries are useful targets for gravitational wave studies, so the development of an efficient way of finding them, and the prospect of there being more of them, should stimulate interest in work on predicting the strength of gravitational waves and assist in their eventual detection. Galaxies are believed to evolve through merging 1 , which should lead to some hosting multiple supermassive black holes 2 , 3 , 4 . There are four known triple black hole systems 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , with the closest black hole pair being 2.4 kiloparsecs apart (the third component in this system is at 3 kiloparsecs) 7 , which is far from the gravitational sphere of influence (about 100 parsecs for a black hole with mass one billion times that of the Sun). Previous searches for compact black hole systems concluded that they were rare 9 , with the tightest binary system having a separation of 7 parsecs (ref. 10 ). Here we report observations of a triple black hole system at redshift z = 0.39, with the closest pair separated by about 140 parsecs and significantly more distant from Earth than any other known binary of comparable orbital separation. The effect of the tight pair is to introduce a rotationally symmetric helical modulation on the structure of the large-scale radio jets, which provides a useful way to search for other tight pairs without needing extremely high resolution observations. As we found this tight pair after searching only six galaxies, we conclude that tight pairs are more common than hitherto believed, which is an important observational constraint for low-frequency gravitational wave experiments 11 , 12 .

Many important activities, such as charitable giving, voting, and paying taxes, are difficult to explain by the narrow self-interest hypothesis. This paper tests conditional cooperation in a field experiment. The field experiment about charitable giving supports the theory of conditional cooperation: contributions increase, on average, if people know that many others contribute. The effect varies, however, depending on past contribution behavior - those who never contributed do not change their behavior, while people who are indifferent about contributions react most strongly to information about others' behavior. Section I presents the field experiment and the empirical strategy to test the hypotheses, Section II shows the results, and Section III offers concluding remarks.

We conducted a meta-analysis of previously published empirical studies that have examined the effects of nitrogen (N) enrichment on litter decomposition. Our objective was to provide a synthesis of existing data that comprehensively and quantitatively evaluates how environmental and experimental factors interact with N additions to influence litter mass loss. Nitrogen enrichment, when averaged across all studies, had no statistically significant effect on litter decay. However, we observed significant effects of fertilization rate, site-specific ambient N-deposition level, and litter quality. Litter decomposition was inhibited by N additions when fertilization rates were 2-20 times the anthropogenic Ndeposition level, when ambient N deposition was 5-10 kg N· ha-1· yr-1, or when litter quality was low (typically high-lignin litters). Decomposition was stimulated at field sites exposed to low ambient N deposition (<5 kg N· ha-1· yr-1) and for high-quality (low-lignin) litters. Fertilizer type, litterbag mesh size, and climate did not influence the litter decay response to N additions.

The terrestrial biosphere sequesters up to a third of annual anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, offsetting a substantial portion of greenhouse gas forcing of the climate system. Although a number of factors are responsible for this terrestrial carbon sink, atmospheric nitrogen deposition contributes by enhancing tree productivity and promoting carbon storage in tree biomass. Forest soils also represent an important, but understudied carbon sink. Here, we examine the contribution of trees versus soil to total ecosystem carbon storage in a temperate forest and investigate the mechanisms by which soils accumulate carbon in response to two decades of elevated nitrogen inputs. We find that nitrogen-induced soil carbon accumulation is of equal or greater magnitude to carbon stored in trees, with the degree of response being dependent on stand type (hardwood versus pine) and level of N addition. Nitrogen enrichment resulted in a shift in organic matter chemistry and the microbial community such that unfertilized soils had a higher relative abundance of fungi and lipid, phenolic, and N-bearing compounds; whereas, N-amended plots were associated with reduced fungal biomass and activity and higher rates of lignin accumulation. We conclude that soil carbon accumulation in response to N enrichment was largely due to a suppression of organic matter decomposition rather than enhanced carbon inputs to soil via litter fall and root production.