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

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Q&A websites are plagued with problems that few have yet to solve. Social Media Q&A is all the rage: Facebook just upgraded its questions feature , TED launched a website for its own community, Quora has culled a suprising response from experts, and firebrand Congressman Anthony Weiner held a marathon Twitter session on the anniversary of the new healthcare law

NEW YORK CITY--Who brewed--and then enjoyed--the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don't yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1960--the same year that a U.S.

Welcome to Fast Feed, the Fast Company reader's essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web--bite-sized and updated all day. 'Nano-bricks' lock in food flavor longer : A new transparent packaging technology, made from the same particles used to construct clay bricks, could keep food fresh longer, maybe for years.

Living and working in the high Arctic at this time of year is full of challenges. From the small everyday stuff like sleeping, washing and using the toilet, to the bigger issues that affect our science such as icing up of instruments, freezing of your water samples and keeping a hole in the ice open when the air temperature is -37 o C.

NEW YORK -- Could coal be the key to manufacturing lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, including electric cars? It may seem counterintuitive to use coal to reduce a vehicle's fuel consumption, and thus its CO2 output. But one scientist at a New York technical school thinks he's found a way, and hopes to market it to automakers and the growing electric vehicle industry.

Boreal forests across the Northern hemisphere are undergoing rapid, transformative shifts as a result of a warming climate that, in some cases, is triggering feedback loops producing even more regional warming, according to several new studies. Russia's boreal forest - the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world - has seen a transformation in recent years from larch to conifer trees, according to new research by University of Virginia researchers. [More]

Airplane manufacturers have been changing over from aluminum to advanced composite materials. These lighter, stronger composites are made of fibers of carbon or glass embedded in a second material, often plastic

There may be no scientist more obscure relative to his immense accomplishments than Claude Elwood Shannon, who died just over a decade ago, on February 24, 2001, at the age of 84. Shannon was not only the creator of information theory, which provides the mathematical framework that makes digital communications possible (and which I discussed in a recent post )

In 1970, Dov Frohman was a young electrical engineer working for a relatively unknown 100-person company called Intel. While troubleshooting a problem with an Intel product one day, Frohman stumbled upon a radically new way to record memory on a semiconductor.

An English prof gains a cult following on campus through "Jeffbook," his 3,221-entry (and counting) experiment in literary criticism, conducted exclusively on Facebook. His StairMaster mastery and Red Bull-slamming ability may also have helped

Students, parents, teachers : the Google Science Fair ’s deadline is April 4. Scientific American is a media partner, and I am a judge.

Thinking different?

Accent matters more than looks when it comes to identifying a person’s ethnicity, according to a study published in the November Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . [More]