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

Seeing a reminder that International Clinical Trials Day will soon occur, I wanted to recognize and thank the clinical research teams and volunteers that make this possible. Clinical research is an enormously complicated endeavor, requiring close cooperation from a number of disparate groups, including sponsors, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, laboratory and radiology staff, regulators, ethics committees, suppliers and the community, in addition to the people providing the infrastructure, such as the basic science researchers, statisticians, and managerial support

I’m sorry. Very, truly sorry.

Cave-riddled hills jut steeply from the flat pine savanna of Runaway Creek Nature Reserve in Belize. Tapirs, jaguars and wild pigs call the forest-blanketed hillsides home.

When cosmetic gynecologist Adam Ostrzenski, MD set out to discover the elusive G-spot, the part of a woman s anatomy supposedly responsible for orgasm, he followed a flawed premise but his finding announced today will undoubtedly generate frantic media coverage. The discovery of the G-spot in a lone elderly corpse and the lack of information on just what Dr. O dissected are obvious limitations of the paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine , a peer-reviewed publication from Wiley.

Today, an image of a zipper runs down Google s home page in celebration of the 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback, who helped make the device an indispensable item for today’s man on the go. (Read that as you will.) Sundback did not invent the slide fastener, as it is generically called (“zipper” is actually a trade name for a version developed by the B.F. Goodrich company).

Want to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle?

The asteroid Vesta In a widely anticipated announcement today, the new company Planetary Resources revealed their plans for near-Earth asteroid domination. The group has mapped out a multi-stage process to map, observe, capture, tow and eventually mine asteroids for valuables. “A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the platinum group metals mined in history,” reads the company’s press release .

Online game informs researchers and policy makers about caring for watershed areas [More]

A flowering shrub from the Andean cloud forests made taxonomic history last month. The plant--now dubbed Brunfelsia plowmaniana --had puzzled botanists for decades as they endeavored to determine whether or not it was truly an evolutionary newcomer

Gone are the days of riding in the family station wagon, inhaling smelly, sooty fumes from a noisy diesel engine.

On day 3 of the Experimental Biology conference, I listened to a fascinating talk on cognitive dysfunction following chemotherapy, how we can study it, and how we might go about treating it. Check it out.

The three types of people that are necessary for any team tasked with innovation. Bloomberg recently profiled an entrepreneurial luminary, Steve Blank, who teamed up with the National Science Foundation to teach classes for the newly formed NSF Innovation Corps. The NSF I-Corps, as it's called, seeks to commercialize new products out of U.S

Guest Blog by Leonard Mlodinow* Belonging to a group is good for your health. Courtesy of joncandy via Flickr.

When we meet new people, we assess their character by watching their gestures and facial expressions. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that those nonverbal cues are communicating the presence of a specific form of a gene that makes us more or less responsive to others’ needs. [More]

It is rather odd how often I hear the expression paradigm shift during contemporary scientific presentations and seminars. The expression was popularized by Thomas Kuhn s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions .