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

[Sound clip] That's the future sound filling city streets.

By Chloe McIvor of Nature magazine A global effort has finally cracked the complex genome of the potato, which is published today in Nature.

Photographs by Adam Dean and Susetta Bozzi China is reclaiming its place as the world's megabazaar, with the city of Yiwu as its one-stop shop for traders from the Muslim world. THE megamall is bustling with shoppers at noon when two Pakistani men -- dark-skinned with black beards, wearing white skullcaps and the traditional salwar kameez of the subcontinent -- drop their bags near a third-floor sporting-goods shop. They remove their leather sandals, place their safari vests on the floor, and prostrate themselves toward Mecca, thousands of miles away

The most important sign language study done with an ape was surely the first one back in the 1960s, with Washoe, for it established that chimpanzees can use American Sign Language (ASL).

While reading about social science and environmental communication, I’ve noticed a gap between how environmentalists in the United States view personal space and how their audiences perceive it. If environmentalists tell audiences not to " say ‘eww’ to thrift stores ," avoid public transit , or live in suburbs , they may encounter resistance - not because their audiences are opposed to sustainable choices, but because they value personal space. Instead of overlooking personal space issues, environmentalists should address them constructively

I can't even recall a time that I wasn't cognisant of the fact that I lived in a country that actively pioneered space exploration. I remember sitting on wicker hassock in my Dad's study, as a child and asking lots of questions. Dad would light his pipe, lean back in his big red chair, blow circular smoke rings and try his best to answer them.

(Recasts with EPA results, five treated at hospitals sincespill) [More]

By Laura Zuckerman BILLINGS, Mont., July 9 (Reuters) - ExxonMobil on Saturday submitted a draft clean-up plan of its Yellowstone River oil spill to the U.S. [More]

It's often said that these are exciting times to be a computational biologist, and indeed they are. But beyond the flashy, gee-whiz aspects of computational biology, I find myself excited for another reason: the tools of in silico biology offer us views of biological systems that we wouldn’t otherwise have. [More]

NAME: Zhou-Feng Chen TITLE: Director, Center for the Study of Itch at the Washington University School of Medicine [More]

There in the mud, just waiting to be scooped up, is a natural resource deposit potentially worth billions and billions of dollars.

Polar bears' "mitochondrial Eve," the female from whom all of today's polar bears are descended, was not a polar bear at all. [More]

Cameras were once big and bulky.

The likelihood that a baby born in the U.S. will die within its first year is less than a third of what it was 50 years ago

Earlier this year a 22-year-old college dropout, Jared Lee Loughner, shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords through the head near a Tucson supermarket, causing significant damage to Giffords’s brain. In the same shooting spree, Loughner killed or wounded 18 others, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Information from Loughner’s postings on YouTube and elsewhere online suggests that he is severely mentally ill.