In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.

Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.

A lot of countries already do as you suggest, Sweden included. However, from what I understand there's a problem in the US in that trains often load with double stacked containers, increasing the total height of trains. This makes it infeasible to electrify your rails due to the overhead wires needing to go too high up. In order to electrify, you would have to also switch out a lot of train cars.

Overall though, electric trains are cheaper and more powerful if the infrastructure is there and most concerns about track longevity that people had back in the 70s-80s have been largely dispelled. It's mostly just a matter of actually investing in the power lines (and of course the power grid).

To be fair, gasoline cars get terrible mileages at those speeds as well, although maybe not as terrible. On the other hand, I imagine electrics will have a massive advantage in city driving thanks to not needing gears and the perk of regenerative braking.

Depends on what you mean by quite stable. During the dinosaur eras temperatures were much hotter for millions of years. This tells me that there's not just a single equilibrium point possible, stable or not.

Maybe they do! Maybe they also have cloaking. Who's to say they aren't probing Uranus right now?!

Monsanto's business practices notwithstanding, what exactly is so terrible about GMO foods?

Selective breeding has been a thing for millennia and that's messing about with DNA, although in an indirect way. Changing foods so as to get rid of traits that are detrimental and add/keep traits that are beneficial is bad, why, exactly? If your opposition is anything resembling "but we don't know that it's good/bad!" then that just means that GMO should be held to a stricter scientific rigour. All things considered, science knows very little about which foods are good/bad for you, including the so called natural foods so the "but we don't know!" can be used for anything you put in your mouth.

Why do we know this, exactly?

I've replied to gweihir above pointing out the fact that his link is a commentary about an older experiment which indeed seemed deeply flawed.

However, I've actually read the report released today (not the older arXiv article, but the sifferkoll.se pdf linked in today's summary) and it seems a hell of a lot more controlled and "hands off" with regards to Rossi's involvement than what's been stated about previous experiments.

That analysis is from February 2014, the current report is from an experiment taking place for "32 days in March 2014"(that's a quote from the pdf linked in TFS) .

Not to mention the fact that the opening statements of your linked article directly contradicts the report. Your link says that it took place in Italy with Andrea Rossi's equipment, but according to the pdf in TFS the experiment took place in Switzerland with their own factory calibrated never before used equipment.

So unless the authors of that link you provided had a time machine back in February and are also delusional, they couldn't possibly be referring to this experiment.

That's supposed to be "varldsdel" with two dots over the a.

Swedes most certainly do not, as our superior language (no bias here!) has two different words that describe what a geological continent is (kontinent) and what a geopolitical part of the world is (världsdel).

Just because English with it's hundreds of thousands of words don't make that distinction doesn't mean other languages don't.

That was a very nice read, thank you for the link!