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

This past December Jim Weatherall and I wrote " A Geometric Theory of Everything " for Scientific American , describing progress on unified geometric theories of gravitation and the Standard Model of particle physics. My personal contribution to this progress, a developing model called E8 Theory, was introduced three years ago in a paper titled " An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything ." Almost immediately after this paper appeared, physicists and the interested public began a lengthy process of considering and discussing this new theory's merits and faults. Not surprisingly, the initial response was largely critical, with most commenters encountering some unfamiliar mathematical structures in the paper and responding with appropriate skepticism

In the May 2011 issue of Scientific American mathematician John Baez co-authors "The Strangest Numbers in String Theory," an article about the octonions, an eight-dimensional number system that was discovered in the mid–19th century but that has been largely ignored until quite recently. As the name of the article implies, interest in the octonions has been rekindled by their surprising relationship to recent developments in theoretical physics, including supersymmetry, string theory and M-theory.

Key concepts Electricity [More]

The idea of cloud computing is to make all the information and services run in data centers around the world available via the Web. The reality of this is daunting.

A robot must protect its own existence. [More]

Could plastic bottles and metal food can liners be contributing to the American asthma epidemic? A study presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting this past weekend suggests so, finding that pregnant women exposed to bisphenol A ( BPA )--a chemical building block of plastics from polycarbonate to polyester--gave birth to children with a higher risk of respiratory problems

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine Memories fade, events get conflated, names get attached to the wrong faces, or, in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, signals in safe environments can mistakenly evoke emotions that rightly belong to a battlefield tragedy. [More]

The raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan was planned and conducted in secret. Only a handful of U.S. officials knew about it in advance, and the international community was kept in the dark.

By Christopher Le Coq BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should halt the rapid extinction of plant and animal species by 2020 because it will cost less than trying to repair the damage once it is done, Europe's environment chief said on Tuesday. [More]

The tabloids love a good celebrity romance.

There's a green card . Then there's silver, gold, and platinum

The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt. Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft

Protesters have developed a novel way of smuggling information to the outside world: trading in their mobile camera phones for small, discreet pen cameras. While Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria has not been engaging in violence on a Qadaffi-like scale, snipers have reportedly fired on peaceful protesters and civilian casualties were reported in several cities recently.

"Osama Bin Laden" was tops in Google search yesterday. But not in search advertising, where not a single seller stepped into the void. Web 2.0 was alive and popping on Monday in the wake of the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed

TOKYO (Reuters) - Workers at Japan's crippled nuclear plant began putting up equipment on Tuesday to allow the start of repairs to its cooling systems, key to bringing reactors under control after they were badly damaged in the March 11 quake and tsunami. Soldiers moved to within 10 km (6 miles) of the Fukushima complex to search for those still missing following the disaster, the first time the military is conducting searches in this area since the plant began leaking radiation after the disaster hit. [More]