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

A typical sunflower with a dark center and a mane of large yellow 'petals' (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) The word “sunflower” brings to mind a mane of vibrant yellow petals encircling a dark whorl of seeds.

To say a picture is worth a thousand words would be selling this one rather short.

By Helen Shen of Nature magazine The nerves in a human brain form a three-dimensional grid of criss-crossing fibers, say researchers who have mapped them. The regular pattern creates a scaffold to guide brain development and support more complex and variable brain structures, says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Fifty years after The Jetsons promised us a future of robot maids, flying cars, video phones and meals at the push of a button, it seems that reality may actually surpass this futuristic vision. By 2062, the year the animated show was set, advances in artificial intelligence , sensor networks and robotics promise to make the Jetsons's home in Skypad Apartments, and indeed in all of Orbit City, seem quaint by comparison (although flying cars may remain out of reach--especially ones that beat parking problems by folding into a suitcase).

These trends could make for huge opportunities--or huge disruptions to your business. Either way, they are ones to watch

Climate change is bringing more droughts, heat waves and powerful rainstorms, shifts that will require governments to change how they cope with natural disasters to protect human lives and the world economy, a new U.N. report says.

Even as Iran s nuclear program raises the likelihood of yet another conflict in the Middle East, the bigger threat is a potential food crisis in the making, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. When I ask myself, what are the threats for out security today, foreign aggression doesn t make top five, Brown told attendees of the Affordable World Security Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Grain: some countries are hitting a ceiling on agricultural productivity [More]

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A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought.

Mitochondrial network of an endothelial cell is shown in green Research projects evolve in a fortuitous manner, often guided by a convergence of novel observations, intuition, helpful colleagues and unique personal circumstances. It is precisely this constellation that prompted two cardiologists to study the mitochondrial networks in lung cancer cells.

How’s this for luck? Two tree species that scientists believed were extinct twice have been rediscovered in a remote area of Tanzania. According to a paper published in the Journal of East African Natural History , the two species were rediscovered in the remote, highly fragmented and rarely explored Namatimbili Ngarama Forest, 35 kilometers inland from the Indian Ocean.

Three of the U.S. military's newest recruits reported for duty this week at the Army Test and Evaluation Command . These troops are different from normal soldiers in several ways--for starters, each has six feet.

Colette Dziadul struggled for years to understand her daughter’s joint problems. Dana, who is now 14 years old, complained from toddlerhood that her knees and ankles hurt. The aches kept her up at night, made her wake her parents to ask for painkillers and forced her to sit out school sports.

By Lucy Hornby and Jim Bai BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Three Gorges Corp. [More]

LONDON (Reuters) - The collapse of an ice sheet in Antarctica up to 14,650 years ago might have caused sea levels to rise between 14 and 18 meters (46-60 feet), a study showed on Wednesday, data which could help make more accurate climate change predictions. The melting of polar ice could contribute to long-term sea level rise, threatening the lives of millions, scientists say.