"“Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot
buy happiness,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and
assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “People
just might be using it wrong.”"

  http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/happiness_a_buyers_guide/?page=full

"Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity
and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our
ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence
has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are
probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on
earth."

  http://peacecenter.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2009april/Pinker054.php

 (thanks to Stefan for the link.)

"It is not reality that has a time flow, but our very approximate
knowledge of reality. Time is the effect of our ignorance"
 
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726391.500-is-time-an-illusion.html?full=true

 

"Genetic algorithms are a category of optimization techniques, but looking at fitness we can see our problem: first it is attempting to solve a search problem (finding for working solutions, of whatever quality), and then trying to optimize (improving the quality of discovered solutions). Very few--if any--algorithms are going to perform well for both the search and optimization aspects of this problem "

Interesting article with lots of examples in python.

http://lethain.com/entry/2009/jan/19/genetic-programming-a-novel-failure/

"To mask the damage, Tycho – like Galileo Galilei, he is generally known by his first name – designed himself a metallic nose-job. "

Tycho Brahe was an astronomer who had a metallic nose, a pet elk with an alcohol problem and a clairvoyant dwarf as a friend.
Maybe he was the most badass scientist ever :)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5282597.ece

Scientific Commons is a search-engine for scientific publications.
It has a very nice interface and lots of content.

http://en.scientificcommons.org/