Gretchen Rubin has found the secret to happiness. OK, that may be overselling it a bit, but she's made it her literal business to get closer to it through The Happiness Project. Initially a namesake best-selling book, it's since morphed into a series of books (the latest: Happier At Home), a blog, a rapt online community, and an ongoing movement to unify science, psychology, and culture in the pursuit of deeper contentment. Of course, with such an amorphous destination, she's learned the truism behind the cliché that it's "more about the journey" -- but maybe don't use the J-word word around Rubin.

"Some people want to talk about a journey," Rubin says. "Well, that’s not an idea that resonates with me -- I love the idea of a project. That's something that whets my appetite."

Nervous supporters worried that her prescription for happiness might intimidate readers at the starting line; some equated the idea of a "project" with onerous homework. But Rubin, a Yale Law School graduate and former editor of the Yale Law Journal, opened her process to public dialogue and sought to engineer her methodology to apply to any personality type. That dialogue continues to this day on The Happiness Project.

"There’s no one right way to do it, because people are very different," she says. "People have different vocabularies. I love making resolutions, and having lists, and charts -- and for some people that would drive them crazy. But for some people it is about a journey -- so you have to find the approach that works for you, the metaphor that works for you."

We talked with Rubin over the phone about The Happiness Project, and how personal moves toward a happier life can lead to a better, healthier planet for everybody.

Q. What inspired this initial journey to tackle something as all-encompassing as happiness? How did you boil down tackling such a huge-sounding project?

A. I was stuck on a city bus in the pouring rain, and I thought, "What do I want from life, anyway? I want to be happy!" It hit me like a flash. So I went to the library and got this giant stack of books about happiness to figure out what I could do. It seemed very confusing in the beginning, because there’s a million different pieces, and everything’s tangled up with everything else. It was very intellectually challenging to figure out, where do I start and how do I do it in a systematic way. So I drilled down into things like home, possessions, body, neighborhood. Every month I focused on a different aspect of life and figured out what concrete resolutions I could do to make my experience of life happier.

Mac Bishop knows that entrepreneurs need to take risks. So, as the founder of Wool&Prince, he wore the prototype of the company's button-down shirt for 100 straight days:

Each day I attempted to wrinkle and odorize the shirt, but to no avail. In a couple of the more intense tests, such as the five mile runs, I was worried that the shirt wouldn’t revive itself. The entire shirt was damp with sweat and soaked in the pits, chest, and collar. I hung it up over night, said a little prayer, and woke to a fresh shirt in the morning. I’m dead serious. Try it yourself. I put cotton shirts and a synthetic shirt through the same test and the stench was unbearable. Some crazy science stuff going on here.

First of all, ew. Second of all, Wool&Prince hasn't released many details on the “crazy science stuff” behind this miracle. Well, there’s this:

Energy efficiency is one of those unfortunate ideas that's so, so useful and also so, so boring and hard to get people excited about. Most people, given the choice between solar panels and well-insulated walls, will choose to spend their money on solar panels, because they're cool.

But La Plate-forme Maison Passive has managed what I never thought possible. It's made energy efficiency sexy -- so sexy it needed multiple dildos as props:

Thanks to all of you who took the Gross National Happiness survey, a project of The Happiness Initiative. (And if you haven't taken it yet, you still can!) It’s designed to measure your overall satisfaction with life as well as your sense of well-being across a number of specific categories. Do you feel good about your physical health? The educational and cultural opportunities in your community? Your work life? Your time balance? The environment where you live?

We’ve now gotten the results back for Grist readers and compared them to responses from a random sample of U.S. residents. The bottom line: You guys are a mostly happy bunch, but still a little more bummed out than the average American.

We're about to cry just looking at this little guy, who's confused because his home forest was clear-cut. Maybe the most heartbreaking part is that koalas are protected in Australia, which means he would have been moved out of harm's way before the logging activities began. After which he would have wandered confidently back to his home, only to discover that it wasn't there anymore. No wonder he looks so shocked.

But wait! There's a happy ending!

New York City’s white-footed mice live in the city's parks and wooded areas, but they’re no country mice. They deal with all the dangers of urban living, like disease, pollution, and overcrowding. And as it turns out, the mice may actually be evolving in response to their urban lifestyle.

Scientist Jason Munshi-South wanted to figure out if the pressures of city living had caused the mice to evolve, Carl Zimmer writes at National Geographic. So he caught a bunch, sequenced their genes, and compared them to the genes of their rural cousins.

He and his colleagues found, Zimmer reports, a "handful of genes that evolved due to natural section." And some of them seem to have evolved in response to the pressures of city life:

Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder of Mars One, believes there are at least 500,000 people on Earth who'd like a one-way ticket to Mars. He might be right. Three days ago, his company opened up applications for its first project, which aims to send four people to Mars in 2023 as a "permanent human settlement,” and already 20,000 people have thrown their names into the hat. Don’t they know they’re all going to go crazy and kill each other?

Here's what's required for Round 1:

The online application consists of general information about the applicant, a motivational letter, a resume and a one minute video in which the applicant answers some given questions and explains why he or she should be among the first humans who set foot on Mars. At this stage the potential candidates can submit their application in one of the 11 most used languages on Internet: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, Korean.

Here's the list of qualifications the company's looking for. They include resiliency (“you are at your best when things are at their worst” -- yyyyyyep), adaptability, and ability to trust. (They say that means, "You trust in yourself and maintain trust in others." But it possibly also means "trust that you're not going to die immediately or in some terribly Hobbesian way alone on a distant planet.") You also have to pay $38.

We have seen a lot of solar chargers in our day. And among all of them, this is the first one we've seen that we will definitely run out and buy as soon as it's made available in the U.S. It's a portable socket that gets its power from the sun rather than the grid. You plug into a window instead of into the wall. It's easy.

That was the whole point, according to the designers, Kyohu Song and Boa Oh: "We tried to design a portable socket, so that users can use it intuitively without special training," they write.

It is really simple. The portable socket attaches to a window like a leech to human skin. On its underside, it has solar panels:

Adolph the tortoise was found in 1942 in a suburb of London called Muswell Hill, crawling around in a hole left by a German bomb. No one knows how he got there. But given the rest of the story, it's clear to us that he probably had the bomb dropped directly on him and survived. In fact, he probably threw himself on the bomb to save London.

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

My darling husband does our family's dishes so I try to just stay out of his way. But he is convinced that the environmentally safe dishwasher detergents are not effective. Then again, opening the door after a completed cycle with his super-duper soap is so noxious that I am convinced these detergents leave behind residue subsequently to be consumed by me and his lovely daughter. What's the rub?

Michele C.
Keene, N.H.

A. Dearest Michele,

It is awfully hard to argue with people who take on odious chores, isn’t it? Ordinarily I would agree with your urge to give your husband a wide berth, but dish detergent happens to be a subject about which I am passionate. Hey, we all have our passions.

First, let us celebrate the fact that your husband is using the dishwasher. As we have discussed before, a fully loaded dishwasher is more efficient than hand-washing dishes. Our friends at the Energy Star program swear it saves us time and money, too, to the tune of 10 days a year and $431 over the life of the machine. (Those of us not blessed with dishwashers can save water by filling a basin or two in the sink instead of leaving the water running while we wash up. But you knew that.)

So are your husband’s habits putting your family at risk? For many years, mainstream detergents contained phosphates, which were magic on dishes but fatal for fishes. In 2010, a controversial ban on phosphates took effect, relieving us of that worry, but conventional detergents still contain an alphabet soup of unsettling ingredients, which can include chlorine, sulfuric acid, and the nefarious “fragrance.”