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

Dear Earth Talk : How healthy is soy?

Subject 046M, two years old, was seated nervously across from me at the table, his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. He appeared to have caught an incurable case of the squirms. I resisted the urge to laugh and leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially.

Bedbug sprays sold for residential use in neighborhood stores rarely eradicate or prevent bedbugs. Credit: Amy Maxmen [More]

A simulation of galactic growth shows how a galaxy akin to our own Milky Way might have appeared 10 billion years ago.

Key concepts Traits [More]

Global warming is altering--and threatening to erase--much more of the Marshall Islands than the shorelines of this independent Micronesian nation that once served as a Pacific Ocean nuclear weapons test site for the U.S. It is changing the vocabulary and heightening the risk of extinguishing the language and culture of daily life. Locals already have integrated the phrases "climate change" and "seawall" into the nation's two predominant dialects of the Marshallese language, which is unique to this archipelagic country.

By Nadia Drake of Nature magazine A high-profile claim that the Human Genome Project and associated research generated almost US$800 billion in economic benefits has been questioned by economists. The estimate comes from the Battelle Memorial Institute, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio

One way advertisers convince us to buy something is to remind us that we’ve enjoyed their product before. Unfortunately, we can have fond memories of a product that we’ve never even had. Or that doesn’t even exist

Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom.

So you may have noticed an elephant in the room--more specifically, an elephantine abstraction that began appearing on our Web site today, like the one outside the margin at the left. That's an Ellie, a stabile designed by Alexander Calder and bestowed by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME).

Nursing homes are unnecessarily administering powerful antipsychotic drugs to many elderly residents, including residents with dementia [1] , according to a new report by the Health and Human Services inspector general. The Food and Drug Administration in 2005 mandated that drug makers issue warning labels [2] on atypical antipsychotics, noting that the drugs--which are generally FDA-approved for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder--increase the risk of death for elderly patients with dementia. Yet when the government examined 1.4 million Medicare claims from 2007 for atypical antipsychotics for elderly nursing home residents, the government found that 88 percent of the time, the drugs were prescribed to individuals diagnosed with dementia

[More]

Facebook shut down the Syrian military's official page, and Syrian Facebook users began encountering a primitive certificate-forging scam seemingly carried out by the government. See what happens when cyberwarfare comes to the formerly friendly Facebook. The “Facebook revolution” line has been used endlessly in the Middle East.

[More]

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine In the era of WikiLeaks and Twitter, can anyone keep a secret? Governments have learned that, all too often, the answer is no. [More]