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

You don't have to be a Hollywood mogul to have someone do mind-numbing tasks for you. Just ask Ted Roden

A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there . NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space.

Tyler Keillor (pronounced “KEEL-er”) is a soft-spoken, understated paleoartist whose work is anything but. He works at the University of Chicago as a paleoartist, reconstructing creatures that paleontologist Paul Sereno excavates on his expeditions around the world. When I met Tyler eleven years ago, he was working in a cavernous, three-story high cinderblock warehouse, with no heat and no ventilation (Sereno has since turned the space into a world-class dinosaur prep lab)

By Declan Butler and Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine The U.S.

To ease on in to the weekend, let’s celebrate by watching some short films on a topic that I mentioned earlier this week in my planthopper post: plant bug poo, aka honeydew . It’s not as gross as you might think.

Jonathan Ende is bringing the TED brand of futurism to the heart of high finance: the New York Stock Exchange, for TEDx Wall Street.

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PASADENA The theory is so obscure there’s not a Wikipedia page about it yet. It might be impossible to formulate mathematically. One theoretical physicist calls it the Emperor Palpatine of theories, even more powerful and inscrutable than the Darth Vader theory that he and others have been studying intensively.

By Henning Gloystein LONDON (Reuters) - Wild Well Control, a company that helped tackle the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Kuwait's raging oil fires, have joined efforts to avert disaster at a leaking gas platform off Scotland, rig operator Total said. Firefighters and engineers from the Houston-based company are experts at disasters such as oil rig explosions and have been dubbed "Hellfighters" by Hollywood. The firm was hired along with Britain's Oil Spill Response, Total said this week, after a gas leak began last Sunday aboard its Elgin platform some 240 km (150 miles) off the east coast of Scotland

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study. [More]

Emerging headphones purveyor 50 Cent studied a predecessor closely before pressing play on his own venture. When Beats by Dre headphones debuted in 2008, the size of the $100-plus headphone market was a faint $92 million. Four years later, the good doctor's b-emblazoned earpieces have achieved near ubiquity, and the $100-plus segment has been cranked up to $512 million.

Conservatives' trust of science has gradually decreased over the past 40 years, beginning perhaps when empirical research was increasingly used to justify government regulations, according to a new academic analysis. [More]

Consider an hour without power, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, local time. Organizers say as many as 1.8 billion will join in the symbolic environmental event worldwide.

Here are four things you can do now to increase the value of your business-and give you a smoother transition out when the time is right. As entrepreneurs we are constantly putting out fires, prioritizing and re-prioritizing our most urgent tasks, and changing our schedules so rapidly that committing to lunch with an old friend next week brings a certain sense of anxiety. We run our businesses to achieve our mission and earn a profit.

A new " bioreactor " could store electricity as liquid fuel with the help of a genetically engineered microbe and copious carbon dioxide. The idea--dubbed " electrofuels " by a federal agency funding the research--could offer electricity storage that would have the energy density of fuels such as gasoline.