Science

Are we happier when the weather is good?

A beautiful day makes you feel good, right? Now we have the large-scale evidence to prove it.

Are we happier when the weather is good?

t would be pretty easy to assume from anecdotal evidence that humans prefer warm sunny days rather than cold wet ones. But what empirical evidence is there for this? Patrick Baylis and his colleagues at Stanford University have carried out the largest investigation into the relationship between meteorological conditions and mood. They did this by analysing how the sentiment of geolocated social media posts changed with the weather.

Baylis and colleagues measured the sentiment of 3.5 billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals on both Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2016. They did this by counting the number of positive and negative words each post contained, assuming that this was good proxy for our mood.

Then they compared this to the daily meteorological data from each location. They found a significant increase in negative sentiment when the weather was both too cold or too hot and when it was too wet, too humid, and cloudy. But how large is this effect? To make a direct comparison, the team measured the change in sentiment associated with specific events - earthquakes and terror attacks. And they found the change in sentiment was of a similar magnitude to that associated with freezing weather. From their results weather appears not to have a mild effect on mood, but be a scorcher.

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How the Supreme Court ruling on gender is impacting queer people at Imperial

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How the Supreme Court ruling on gender is impacting queer people at Imperial

Last month, the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010 (EA 2010), the definition of a woman is based on biological sex.  The case brought before the court, For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, asked if transgender women should be included

By Oscar Mitcham and Isabella Duchovny
College opens Imperial Global India in Bengaluru

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College opens Imperial Global India in Bengaluru

Imperial College London has launched its fourth global hub in Bengaluru. The hub will host research programmes with Indian partners, focusing on some of “the world’s most pressing challenges in areas such as climate change and sustainability, food and water security, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).” Launched at the Science

By Mohammad Majlisi