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

An x-ray image of the region around Sgr A*. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff et al.

When it comes to science, temperature matters. And when it comes to Wisconsin, things get really, really cold.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

By Shinichi Saoshiro TOKYO (Reuters) - A lack of preparation and poor communication at top levels after disaster struck were among the failures that turned a nuclear accident at Japan's Fukushima plant into the worst atomic crisis in 25 years, a panel probing the disaster said on Monday. [More]

Environmentalism, like politics in general, is depressingly polarized these days. On one side, alarmists like the activist Bill McKibben , climatologist James Hansen and blogger Joe Romm warn that if we don’t cut way back on fossil fuels now! civilization may collapse.

Sci is off to the frozen north to visit people for the holidays. She’ll be back very shortly, but in the meantime, here is a repost, to make us all feel a little warmer

Glowing genes: White arrows show hot spots of ADAR activation; courtesy of Reenan Lab/Brown University It’s a long way from gene to protein. The dogmatic scenario is: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into protein . But in real life, and in real living things, the workings aren’t quite that simple.

According to holiday lore, poor Rudolph was a victim of social exclusion because he was different from the rest of the reindeer. In a move that was lucky for nice (but not naughty) children everywhere, he was then approached by Santa, who asked him to guide the sleigh.

I am dreaming of a white Christmas. Certainly, they were rare in St.

A cringe-worthy chorus of “Happy Birthday” is usually all it takes to earn the label of “tone-deaf.” Yet fewer than 1 percent of the population is truly amusical, that is, lacking the ability to distinguish different pitches. [More]

When I’m talking I can hear my own voice. And with that feedback I can tell almost immediately when I’ve made an error. Like I just did

Before video games and robotics competitions, toys were much simpler: girls got dolls; boys got model trains and bicycles. Toys that promoted learning and experimentation were rare until one inventor, Alfred Carlton (“A

Four years ago Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow turned to her husband after looking up some movie trivia online and asked, “What did we do before the Internet?” Thus, Sparrow set out to investigate how Google, and all the information it proffers, has changed how people think.

If the NFL and NBC can successfully stream the wildly popular, three-hour-plus Super Bowl live via Verizon’s mobile network on February 5th the event could usher in a whole new level of demand for high-speed wireless bandwidth. The U.S

Most photovoltaic solar cells have an inherent efficiency cap, limiting how much useful energy they can extract from the sun. But scientists are finding ways around this obstacle with new research that could make solar energy more efficient and more cost-effective