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

Dear EarthTalk : How do I learn about what pesticides may be on the food I eat? [More]

The human body is a tireless gardener, growing new cells throughout life in many organs--in the skin, blood, bones and intestines.

A synthetic compound long known to exhibit interesting transition properties may hold the key to new, non-magnetic forms of information storage, say researchers at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center and their collaborators. The team's latest findings shed light on the complex relationship between a compound's electron spin arrangement and its transport properties, an area researchers have long struggled to understand.

Key concepts [More]

(Phys.org) -- When two photons simultaneously enter two input ports of a beam splitter, their paths interfere destructively, which causes the photons to simultaneously exit the beam splitter through the same output port. Because this quantum interference effect changes the input into a different output, it could have applications in quantum information processing. But whereas the two photons are usually identical in experiments demonstrating this effect, a new study has demonstrated that quantum interference can also occur between two photons with different frequencies, giving researchers an additional degree of control.

Credit: NAOJ The universe is a big place, and by peering across it astronomers get to look back in time . A galaxy or supernova so far away that it takes two billion years for its light to reach us will be seen here as it appeared two billion years ago. Remarkably, today s best telescopes can look across the majority of cosmic time, spying on galaxies as they looked just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

(Phys.org) -- With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense – the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has quantum mechanical properties.

Imagine being an extraterrestrial geologist in geostationary orbit above the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. You’re the first explorers to reach Earth (underpants-thieving aliens aside), and you haven’t got a lot of data on this little blue marble

(Phys.org) -- The OPERA collaboration has announced yesterday at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Japan, the observation of their second neutrino tau interaction, after the first observation made in 2010.

Some dinosaurs were really huge. And now we may have a better way to estimate just how heavy these giants were. Researchers have developed a method to weigh dinosaurs, based on laser scans of their skeletons.

(Phys.org) -- Researchers have taken a step toward overcoming a key obstacle in commercializing "hyperbolic metamaterials," structures that could bring optical advances including ultrapowerful microscopes, computers and solar cells.

New research from the University of Southampton has devised a new method to more accurately measure gas bubbles in pipelines.

The body contains 10 times more bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms than human cells. Most of these species are harmless--although they can still cause illness if they wind up in the wrong place

Biologists once thought that human beings were phys

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More]