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

As the recent flurry of articles about why portable electronic devices are restricted during air travel makes clear, the conclusion to be drawn from the information available is a very complicated: “We just don’t know.” For this reason alone airlines err on the side of caution, asking people nicely (and sometimes not so nicely) to turn off their gadgets during takeoff and landing.

Once adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus--a sound, a flash of light--with the pain of an electric shock, they don't easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign.

Most Americans flush the toilet without thinking twice about where the contents end up, but a handful of companies are paying close attention to what goes down the drain. They argue it should be seen as a resource rather than waste

Image of organism fossil, once throught to be an ancient animal embryo; courtesy of Swedish Museum of Natural History The proverbial primordial soup from which our earliest, multi-cellular ancestors emerged was presumably seething with many much simpler, single-celled organisms. Finding the first indications of evolution into more advanced, embryonic development has proved difficult, however, both because of the organisms’ small size and soft structures

Several vertebrate species can distinguish between, say, two and five bananas--but with the exception of primates, they can’t grasp the numerical rules that would let them arrange their piles of fruit from least to most. Now, new research suggests that pigeons, like primates, can follow these abstract numerical rules

By Scott DiSavino (Reuters) - U.S. regulators moved a step closer on Thursday toward clearing the country's first nuclear reactors since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even as the industry struggles against plunging natural gas prices and safety fears after Japan's Fukushima disaster.

XMRV image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention A recent research paper that linked a retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome was fully retracted Thursday, following more than a year of growing doubts and incremental backpeddling by researchers and journals alike

Photographs never quite capture the sparkling blue tint of glacial ice, so when I visited the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia on a backpacking trip through South America some years ago, I was happy to get this camera angle: the blue of the Argentine flag gives you a sense of what the blue of the ice looks like in person.

In a 2008, for a few moments, Republicans and Democrats came together in support of action to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In an ad sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s group, Alliance for Climate Protection , Former Speakers of the House Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sat down together and voiced their agreement that the “country must take action to address climate change.” Pelosi went further, saying that the country needs “cleaner forms of energy.. fast.” [More]

This year was quite an eventful one in spaceflight, with many vessels launching toward the heavens -- and a few crashing back to Earth . [More]

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has a degree in medicine, so I would expect that he’s had some rudimentary biology education at some point in his life.

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets .

It’s better than an ant farm. It’s more exciting than a flea circus

Key concepts [More]

In South Africa they have a problem, a big one: too many elephants. [More]