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

Reductionist biology--examining individual brain parts, neural circuits and molecules--has brought us a long way, but it alone cannot explain the workings of the human brain, an information processor within our skull that is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the universe. We must construct as well as reduce and build as well as dissect. To do that, we need a new paradigm that combines both analysis and synthesis.

(Phys.org) -- Matter exhibits weird properties at very cold temperatures.

When I first saw the coverage of the article appear on Jezebel saying that exercise doesn’t help depression, I didn’t believe it. I read the press release , and really didn’t believe it. And then, I read the article .

By David Fogarty and David Stanway SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) - China's carbon emissions could be nearly 20 percent higher than previously thought, a new analysis of official Chinese data showed on Sunday, suggesting the pace of global climate change could be even faster than currently predicted. China has already overtaken the United States as the world's top greenhouse gas polluter, producing about a quarter of mankind's carbon pollution that scientists say is heating up the planet and triggering more extreme weather. But pinning down an accurate total for China's carbon emissions has long been a challenge because of doubts about the quality of its official energy use data.

Roughly 10,000 years ago, the great sheets of ice that had covered much of the planet receded, triggering a wave of extinctions, ecological changes and, ultimately, the rise of human civilization . All those changes came about as roughly 30 percent of the planet's surface went from ice-covered to ice-free

Looks like I’m in for a great summer full of science video goodness! At the end of June, both Carin and I will be heading to an unconference (taking a clue from Bora from Science Online) called BrainSTEM at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada (maybe I’ll get to wave at Stephen Hawking!) We will be discussing many issues related to creating new media with science themes, both as education and entertainment. The wonderfully enthusiastic and positive Angela Maiers , education maven, will be the Keynote speaker.

One of the first things you learn in bacteriology is that bacteria come in different shapes. Not a huge range of shapes admittedly, but the main shapes are spherical, rod-shaped, or spiral. Spherical bacteria make sense as a sphere is a fairly simple shape to grow into and chains or colonies of bacteria allow them to spread into their environment.

Testosterone has a lot of roles--some good, some perhaps counterproductive. Now research suggests that testosterone can make people more poised for aggression, even if they’re not feeling feisty. [More]

#StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip. We hope you like it. ======= [More]

The amount of chemical and/or particulate pollutants in the air on a global scale is a touchy subject with little cross-border agreement over the best way to alleviate the problem. This week alone, the U.S.

A Testudo tortoise and its large erect penis. [More]

The final nail in the coffin may have been dealt to the idea that neutrino particles can travel faster than light. [More]

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From Nature magazine [More]

If Venus's pass across the sun earlier this week yields a bounty of information for hunters of transiting worlds in other planetary systems, it's because Venus is a known entity. Studying the June 5 Venus transit as if it were a faraway exoplanet "gives us a reality check," says planetary physicist Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford. "We can check on all those exoplanet techniques to see how accurate they really are." Such data may enhance NASA's Kepler mission as well as the many ground-based campaigns using planetary transits to identify distant worlds, a method that has led to the discovery or characterization of more than 200 exoplanets.