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

If there were a Hall of Fame for materials, manganites would be among its members.

Medea, the sensual and ravishing sorceress of Greek mythology, enters the royal chambers.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nobody knows quite how life originated on Earth, but most scientists agree that living cells did not abruptly appear from nonliving cells in a single step. Instead, there were probably a series of pre-cellular life forms that arose from nonliving chemicals and eventually led to a living cell, one that could undergo metabolism and reproduce.

The future of medicine is contained in 'The Four Ps': Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory.

For business users, one big downside to the iPad is its lack of a decent file management system. GroupLogic hopes to solve that problem with new software called mobilEcho

(PhysOrg.com) -- Magnetic studies of ultrathin slabs of copper-oxide materials reveal that at very low temperatures, the thinnest, isolated layers lose their long-range magnetic order and instead behave like a "quantum spin liquid" - a state of matter where the orientations of electron spins fluctuate wildly. This unexpected discovery by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland may offer support for the idea that this novel condensed state of matter is a precursor to the emergence of high-temperature superconductivity - the ability to carry current with no resistance.

We've all been fascinated by balloons. As children we used to get a balloon at the circus, and then suddenly, we're magically mystified by the ability of a toy to do the non-obvious and seemingly impossible: Float in something that we ignore and pay no attention to until something floats "in" it. [More]

With age and enough experience, we all become connoisseurs of a sort.

From work to play, how can someone get the most out of what they do? We continue our Leadership Hall of Fame series, a year-long look at the top business books and authors, with an excerpt from Flow (1990) by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Packing a few extra pounds can hurt a woman's salary and even her ability to get a job, mounting research shows. Yet while women tend to get penalized by the pound, men don't, and perhaps they even gain from girth

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is the wife of Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg.

Meg Cadoux Hirshberg is the wife of Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg.

Trace gas detection, the ability to detect a scant quantity of a particular molecule -- a whiff of formaldehyde or a hint of acetone -- in a vast sea of others, underlies many important applications, from medical tests to air pollution detectors to bomb sniffers. Now, a sensor recently developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology that is hundreds of times faster and more sensitive than other similar technologies may make such detectors portable, economical and fast enough to be used everywhere.

Drilling for natural gas is booming in Pennsylvania--thanks to fracturing shale rock with a water and chemical cocktail paired with the ability to drill in any direction. Despite homeowner complaints, however, research on how such hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is impacting local water wells has not kept pace. Now a new study that sampled water from 60 such wells has found evidence for natural gas–contamination in those within a kilometer of a new natural gas well.

Philadelphia residents have a new weapon for fighting municipal corruption: An iPhone app that lets them send photos and video of money-wasting city employees directly to the controller's office. One crusading Philadelphia politician is using iPhones to fight corruption and fraud. City Controller Alan Butkovitz announced the launch of Philly Watchdog , an anti-corruption iPhone application, on April 19