When life gives you 20 million pigs’ worth of urine, make pig-piss-flavored cigarettes. Or, if you’re not a smoker, use the pig pee to make plastic dinnerware and fuel your car, or smooth it over your body for soft, supple hair and skin. Agroplast, a Denmark-based company, hopes to use its country’s surfeit of pig waste—the cause of contaminated ground water, dying plants, noxious air, and pissed-off neighbors—to make useful household products, from plastics to hair conditioner.

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A University of Chicago study on happiness that’s been called “one of the most thorough examinations of happiness ever done in America” has found that the oldest Americans are also the happiest, and that different population groups reach greater and more equal happiness levels as they age. Among its other reported findings: African Americans are less happy than white people, men are less happy than women (a topic that’s been discussed at length recently), and happiness levels can “rise and fall between eras.”

Also among the findings: Despite their advancing age, which would seem to bring increased happiness, baby boomers, even with their high earning power and societal influence, are less happy than all the other generations surveyed.

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In a remote region in southern Texas, a horde of eight-legged creatures feasts on a flock of helpless prey. These tiny parasites are called fever ticks, and they’re threatening to invade the U.S. and decimate our cattle population. But not if the Tick Riders can stop them.

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• The hottest country code on teh Internets [sic]: .su—as in, the Soviet Union. Which, in case you somehow forgot, doesn’t exist anymore.

• Big prizes are spurring a new age in (and at least one blog about) space exploration. Now PETA hopes to do the same with a $1 million prize to the first mad scientists who can “produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012,” thereby sparing real animals from becoming meat. Note the stipulation about “commercially viable,” you home molecular gastronomists.

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Prozac (and the rest of the SSRI family) may not do much as far as treating most cases of depression, but it turns out it might do wonders for lazy eye. A team of Finnish and Italian researchers announced that the drug, when administered to rats with impaired vision, played a role in correcting their eyesight. Even better, they think it could have the same effect on the two to three percent of humans who have amblyopia, or lazy eye, the most common cause of visual impairment among children.

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Just in case any of the millions of Prozac-takers were feeling lonely after recent revelations that the drug doesn’t really work, now they have still more partners for commiseration: anxiety drugs also don’t do jack for about half of the people who take them. Even worse, physicians have no way of knowing whether a patient will be in one of the non-responsive 50 percent when they prescribe the drug.

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Earlier this week, Yale senior Aliza Shvarts made headlines with her performance art project, which consisted of artificially inseminating herself as often as possible while simultaneously ingesting abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. She reportedly preserved some of the blood from the process, which she claims to be storing in a freezer.

After the blogosphere erupted in outraged shrieks over the project, the university countered with a claim that the whole thing was a “creative fiction,” and that Shvarts was never actually pregnant. She maintains, however, that the project was real, though she couldn’t be certain whether the bleeding events were from abortions or just regular menstruation.

So can we turn to cold, hard science to determine which party is telling the truth? Possibly.

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It’s easy to see how something like tugging on cow udders or yanking the bones out of chickens all day could wreak havoc on your wrists and cause repetitive strain injuries (RSI). But it turns out sign-language interpreters are actually at a higher risk of ergonomic injuries than people doing many other tougher-sounding jobs—dairy hands and chicken-factory workers included.

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• Dot Earth’s Andy Revkin offers a handy re-printing of Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, complete with helpful (and often enlightening) annotations.

• Feeling a little irate about Ben Stein’s new Intelligent Design lovefest, Expelled? Check out this hilarious video parody—you’ll be back to your cheery evolved self in no time.

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Here’s a study that might give Ben Stein pause: a team of researchers at U.C. San Diego have just released a finding that patterns of overfishing may be causing certain fish species to undergo rapid evolution in order to survive. Using around 50 years worth of data tracking both fished and unfished species off the coast of California, the researchers set out to answer the age-old question (among fish researchers, anyway), “Why do heavily fished species, like tuna, vary so much in size, while non-sushi-worthy species stay relatively uniform?”

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