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

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Parasitic mites have turbo-charged the spread of a virus responsible for a rise in honey bee deaths around the world, scientists said on Thursday. Bee populations have been falling rapidly in many countries, fuelled by a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Peacock mantis shrimp with its rock-hard hammer clubs; courtesy of S. Baron The psychedelic -looking peacock mantis shrimp ( Odontodactylus scyllarus ) has a decidedly non-peacenik way of getting a meal: clubbing it. [More]

My old apartment in New York City had seen better days. Stains had darkened the carpet by several shades, and gusts of wind would blow crumbs of decaying brick from the walls

"Please say your destination or flight number for connecting flight information and gate assignments." That was Ava .

Dear EarthTalk : How do I learn about what pesticides may be on the food I eat? [More]

Key concepts [More]

Credit: NAOJ The universe is a big place, and by peering across it astronomers get to look back in time . A galaxy or supernova so far away that it takes two billion years for its light to reach us will be seen here as it appeared two billion years ago. Remarkably, today s best telescopes can look across the majority of cosmic time, spying on galaxies as they looked just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

Imagine being an extraterrestrial geologist in geostationary orbit above the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. You’re the first explorers to reach Earth (underpants-thieving aliens aside), and you haven’t got a lot of data on this little blue marble

Some dinosaurs were really huge. And now we may have a better way to estimate just how heavy these giants were. Researchers have developed a method to weigh dinosaurs, based on laser scans of their skeletons.

The body contains 10 times more bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms than human cells. Most of these species are harmless--although they can still cause illness if they wind up in the wrong place

Biologists once thought that human beings were phys

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More]

Enantiornithine nesting colony, reconstruction by Julio Lacerda. [More]

Over the past few months, we have been flooded with emails from distressed parents asking whether their deaf child will be able to hear one day. With each new email comes a poignant story about a child whose world is silent. It is estimated that hearing loss affects 11% of school age children and even mild loss may adversely influence school performance, cognitive development and language acquisition

If you answered "one of Santa's reindeer" and "a popular video game from the 80s" --this episode of Instant Egghead is for you. Scientific American editor John Matson explains how our favorite space rocks differ.