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

On Saturday, the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Science at the University of Southern California will send nearly 30 researchers on an expedition to Guam and Palau.

By Stuart Grudgings BRASILIA (Reuters) - Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surged in March and April, the government said on Wednesday, fueling criticism that a proposed law to ease land-use rules may be spurring illegal tree-felling. [More]

Gabriela (not her real name), a 42-year-old investment counselor, has been receiving therapy by computer chat for more than a year now. She fell into a deep depression after her last breakup and needed an ear she could count on to be consistently supportive and objective.

With the Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute in northern California, the time is coming when we will encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Contact will probably come sooner rather than later because of Moore’s Law (proposed by Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore), which posits a doubling of computing power every one to two years

Key concepts Solar system [More]

By Philip Ball of Nature magazine Why are we so complicated? You might imagine that we've evolved that way because it conveys adaptive benefits.

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine A massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way--but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted. A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates--for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000--have not been realized. "We have mathematically proven why these 'guesstimates' are flawed," says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study

The makers of the popular bro-wash (Broap?) create a Facebook app that lets you claim to be dating over a hundred girls at once (but actually obliterates your chances to date even one). Dislike! Oh, Axe .

When it comes to debating the issues, the public has a hard time sifting through all the political theater, biases, and endless muckraking. Between boilerplate-spewing press secretaries, 30-second attack ads, and swiftboating, it's often difficult to figure out where candidates and elected officials stand on hot policy topics like health care and the economy without out-of-context buzzwords (Death panels! Socialism!)

Snakes aren’t just lizards without any legs . But a curious group of long, legless lizards look suspiciously like snakes themselves

NASA will launch a scientific instrument into space next month to measure the salt content of the world's oceans, information that could help confirm scientists' suspicions that climate change is accelerating the world's water cycle. The instrument, Aquarius, will launch June 9 as part of a joint mission between NASA and Argentina's space agency. [More]

Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon enjoyed a privileged lifestyle in what is now Luxor about 3,500 years ago. But she may not have been a happy princess towards the end. Two of her three main coronary arteries were calcified, a marker of atherosclerosis

Eighty percent of cushions used in car seats, portable cribs and other baby furnishings contain chemical flame retardants that can accumulate in babies’ bodies, according to a new study to be published Wednesday. More than one-third of the tested products contained the same

By now, we are all familiar with the many reasons we need to lessen our dependency on oil and of the importance in looking for alternative and renewable energery sources. If you need any more convincing, however, maybe you'll go along with an idea printed in the October 11, 1862 Scientific American.

I witnessed a breakup yesterday in the middle of MIT’s vast Infinite Corridor--a hallway known for its heavy traffic and long stretch of straightness. Finals are upon the undergraduates, so perhaps tensions were a bit high for the young, failing couple