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

Men who drink sugar-sweetened beverages, including sodas and non-carbonated fruit drinks, may have a higher risk of heart attack, a new study shows.

By Stephen Strauss of Nature magazine The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics. The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species.

The more scientists discover about desert ants, the more impressive they seem. Decades of research have established that ants use path integration – an innate form of mental trigonometry – in order to navigate the visually featureless environments that are the salt pans of Tunisia.

By Ari Rabinovitch and Rinat Harash JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Completing the same journey they have made for the past 2,000 years, a flock of swifts has flown halfway around the world to nest among the ancient stones of Jerusalem's Western Wall. The scores of small black birds who spend the spring flying high above Jerusalem's Old City and laying eggs in the cracks in the wall, where it is common for visitors to place prayer notes, have become a focus in efforts to rehabilitate the species' diminishing population worldwide

A droplet of water suspended on an iPhone camera acts as a magnifying lens. I’ve engineered a fair number of inexpensive DIY camera hacks. This one is by far the cheapest: it’s free! Simply place a drop of water on the phone’s lens, carefully turn the device over, and the suspended droplet serves as a liquid lens

Long distance space travel could create the ultimate 'killer entrance', devastating your destination and anything around the arriving spacecraft, according to calculations by Professor Geraint Lewis and two honours students from the University of Sydney.

Map of nuclear power reactors in the USA (image from the U.S.

President Obama has called for an "all of the above" energy strategy , ranging from taxpayer funding for electric vehicles to more drilling for oil and natural gas. The goal is to get a greater contribution from domestic renewable energy sources, such as the sun and wind, yet maintain cheap domestic energy from traditional fossil fuels. [More]

Most light emitters, from candles to light bulbs to computer screens, look the same from any angle. But in a paper published this week on the Nature Photonics website, MIT researchers report the development of a new light source — a fiber only a little thicker than a human hair — whose brightness can be controllably varied for different viewers.

BOSTON--The quantum world and the everyday world of human experience are supposed to be two different realms. Quantum effects, as demonstrated in the lab, are usually confined to the tiniest scales.

By Vera Eckert PRENZLAU, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's solution to a large part of its energy dilemma may lie in a muddy field in desolate, windswept flatlands in the northeast. In an area 75 miles north of Berlin that until now has attracted more birdwatchers than cutting-edge industries, start-up Enertrag AG, with the help of partners Vattenfall, Total and Deutsche Bahn, is operating one of the first plants to generate wind power and convert it into hydrogen. Politicians and utilities are looking to the new technology's potential as Germany withdraws from nuclear power and turns to green power to reach 35 percent of its electricity mix by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, from 20 percent today.

I just came back from an 11 mile run. The wind wasn’t awful like it usually is, the sun was out, and I was at peace with the world, and right now, I still am

Slide of invasive prostate adenocarcinoma, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/NIH Circumcision might reduce a man’s risk of developing prostate cancer by 15 percent, according to new research published online March 12 in Cancer .

A scientific panel has narrowly recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an enormous radio telescope (see " Astronomy in South Africa: The long shot ").

By Gus Trompiz PARIS (Reuters) - The world's water supply is being strained by climate change and the growing food, energy and sanitary needs of a fast-growing population, according to a United Nations study that calls for a radical rethink of policies to manage competing claims. "Freshwater is not being used sustainably," UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said in a statement. [More]