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

Dear EarthTalk : Isn’t spray sunscreen a health and environmental nightmare when it seems that more of the sunscreen ends up going up my nose than on the kid at the beach next to me? --Lillian Robertson, Methuen, Mass. Spray cans of sunscreen may no longer contain chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs, which were phased out in the 1990s for causing holes in the stratospheric ozone layer), but many contain other chemicals that are not good for our health or the environment.

A plan to plant flowers to clean up radiation in Japan isn't as crazy as it sounds. A young Japanese entrepreneur is trying to convince people to sow sunflower seeds in Fukushima Prefecture, intending the plants to cleanse the soil of radioactive contamination.

At the next Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, you'll see more web and mobile app companies--even tiny startups--than in years past.

Is hydrogen actually clean, or just clean compared to fossil fuels? Even though it mostly produces water, there are some nasty side effects no one is talking about

Peering far across space and time, astronomers have located a luminous beacon aglow when the universe was still in its infancy. That beacon, a bright astrophysical object known as a quasar, shines with the luminosity of 63 trillion suns as gas falling into a supermassive black holes compresses, heats up and radiates brightly. It is farther from Earth than any other known quasar--so distant that its light, emitted 13 billion years ago, is only now reaching Earth

A project of the Long Now Foundation, the aim is to make sure we preserve the knowledge contained in dying languages: "If languages are our how-to guides for living on planet Earth, we are handing our descendants an encyclopedia with almost all of the pages ripped out." The Long Now Foundation--currently breaking ground in Texas at the future site of its first monument-sized 10,000-year clock --is pursuing several programs in addition to the clock. One of these, the Rosetta Project, takes as its daunting mission the documentation of every human language currently in use; some 7,000 in total, the majority of which are in danger of disappearing without a trace. Directing this ambitious venture is Laura Welcher, a linguist who has specialized in building archival resources for indigenous North American languages.

A newly discovered asteroid should zoom past Earth June 27, posing no threat to the planet but significantly bending the orbital path of the asteroid [ see orbital diagram at left ]. [More]

We Earthlings owe a lot to the moon, and not just for its romantic appeal. The moon locks in Earth's tilt, which would otherwise be a bit wobbly.

Editor's note: The following is a response by climatologist Michael E. Mann to a Q&A article that appeared in the June 2011 issue of Scientific American , which became available to readers in May. Last month, Scientific American ran a disappointing interview by Michael Lemonick of controversial retired University of California, Berkeley, physics professor Richard Muller.

Dear EarthTalk: Radioactive rain recently fell in Massachusetts, likely due to Japan’s nuclear mess. Given the threats of radiation, wouldn’t it be madness now to continue with nuclear power? How can President Obama include nukes as part of a “clean energy” agenda

The magi-cam is a robotic and mirrored surveillance device that most animals can't even see--taking advantage of many species' lack of sense of self.

Birds and sea turtles can migrate thousands of miles, by reading the Earth’s magnetic cues. But we too might have magnetic sensing abilities--in our eyes. So says a study in the journal Nature Communications

Editor's Note: MSU China Paleontology Expedition is a project led by Frankie D. Jackson and David J

Cal-Adapt, the company's new handy climate-change-impact visualizer, makes it easy to understand the specific effects of climate change on where you live (though you may have to move--your neighborhood might be underwater soon). For the average person, data about climate change can be hard to come by.

Editor's Note: MSU China Paleontology Expedition is a project led by Frankie D.