Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

I remember my retirement like it was yesterday. As I recall, I am still working, though not as hard as I did when I was younger

Working at Scientific American , known for its spiffy technical illustrations, I always look for material that can show what an article is trying to tell.

I’ve written before about ancient diseases of the ice age , but this time I’m going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases.

Orangutans at the Jungle Island Zoo in Florida are learning to use IPads to identify object like body parts and food. The hi-tech approach to communication is modelled on a system used successfully with autistic children.

One family generally dines on Chinese takeout while their neighbors eat home-cooked meatloaf. You say potato, I say potahto. And humans aren’t the only primate species with cultural differences: even in the same environment, different groups of chimpanzees use different tools

It is probably no surprise to my regular readers that I get a little exercised about the science wars that play out across the U.S. in various school boards and court actions. It’s probably unavoidable, given that I think about science for a living — when you’ve got a horse in the race, you end up spending a lot of time at the track

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. [More]

CREDIT: Martin Cron, via Flikr One day after new test results showed that only 32 percent of U.S.

Click to see full image, with diameters of Earth and Jupiter for scale. Credit: NASA/SDO Space weather forecasters are keeping a close watch on a large collection of sunspots that could unleash blasts of energy or charged particles toward Earth in the coming days. Sunspot region 1476, the dark patch resembling the Hawaiian Islands in the photo at left, is located near the center of the sun s face as seen from Earth but has yet to act out in any major way.

Drawing on powerful computational tools and a state-of-the-art scanning transmission electron microscope, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Iowa State University materials science and engineering researchers has discovered a new nanometer-scale atomic structure in solid metallic materials known as metallic glasses.

James A.

It may be the nation's last, accepted form of prejudice. But the stigmatization of obesity has repercussions beyond the pain it inflicts on its targets: It threatens to impede efforts to fight the obesity epidemic.

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs [More]

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine About one-quarter of seafood sold as `sustainable' is not meeting that goal, according to an analysis taking aim at the two leading bodies that grant this valuable label to fisheries. In an online paper in Marine Policy and at a conference this week in Edinburgh, UK, fisheries biologist Rainer Froese of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, launched a stinging attack on the schemes by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the marine-conservation organization Friend of the Sea (FOS) to certify fisheries as sustainable. [More]