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

The information age was supposed to usher in a world where we could connect to anyone around the world instantly.

By Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. nuclear safety regulator is studying whether to require plants to more quickly move radioactive waste out of pools as part of a review on safety in the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster, its chairman said on Monday. [More]

Robots, robots everywhere, and they're even starting to think. Here's our round-up of the news about our coming robot overlor--we mean, servants--that has surfaced this week

In emergency situations, establishing reliable comms can be vital for saving lives--but often established grids are taken out by the disaster itself. Enter AT&T's portable cell phone tower. AT&T's new product, the Remote Mobility Zone, is specifically designed for fast deployment in post-disaster situations, and as well as connecting to existing cell networks in situations where a local tower is not working, it can even send phone signals up to sat-com systems.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Spintronics — also known as magnetoelectronics — may replace electronics as the medium of choice for computer memory. The discovery of a mechanism that produces permanent magnets at room temperature, without any external influence, may soon improve the design of spintronic devices. Takumi Ohtsuki from the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Harima and his colleagues in Japan, made the discovery in a class of material called a dilute ferromagnetic oxide.

As officials in Japan deal with the accumulation of radioactive seawater near the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of last month's earthquake and tsunami, the U.S. Department of Energy is investing in fundamental research it hopes can be used to build safer nuclear reactors and avoid reactor emergencies. [More]

"The Skynet missile defense system goes online April 19th 2011, declares war on mankind, and triggers a nuclear apocalypse two days later." So says James Cameron in the Terminator story, anyway.

Fitting a gasoline-powered car engine with frikkin' laser spark plugs may seem like one sci-fi step too far, but since it improves the combustion and cleans-up the exhaust, it may be the gas engine's last gasp before the electric revolution comes. The design of the spark plug really hasn't changed very much since the gasoline engine was invented--they're a device that creates an electric spark across a very precise small gap to ignite the fuel mixture in each cylinder, and apart from improving their materials and reliability there's not much you can do to tweak that. The problem with spark plugs is that they're not particularly good at their raison d'être.

Apple sold almost 5 million iPads around the world last quarter. But it still couldn't make them fast enough to meet demand. Apple sold almost 5 million iPads during its March quarter—and it still couldn’t keep up with the demand, company executives said during a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday

Morgan Pressel is returning to Japan to defend her title, and she will give half of whatever she makes to the American Red Cross toward relief efforts for tsunami and earthquake victims.

After weeks on standby, robots have been called from the sidelines to help inspect reactor buildings at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Is the founding of Twitter the stuff of "The Social Network 2"? You probably know the story by now

Runners World: After 81 years, Clarence Hartley is finally running the Boston Marathon . What took him so long? First there were two wars — Korea and Vietnam — where he served in the United States Air Force

BEIJING, April 13 (Reuters) - China's suspension of nuclearproject approvals, put in place in the wake of Japan's nuclear [More]

BEIJING, April 13 (Reuters) - China's suspension of nuclearproject approvals, put in place in the wake of Japan's nuclear [More]