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

Image courtesy of Shelby Temple Octopuses are purportedly colorblind, but they can discern one thing that we can’t: polarized light . This extra visual realm might give them a leg (er, arm) up on some of the competition. [More]

On March 1, 1962, thousands of people lined New York City s Broadway.

“Game over” for climate change . So opines NASA climatologist Jim Hansen when it comes to the development of the Canadian tar sands.

Online dating might give you something, but it’s probably not a soulmate. [More]

The experience of indulging in your favorite foods involves not only tasting flavors but also feeling the textures sweep across your tongue. [More]

Science fiction often envisions worlds populated by humanoid robots. In reality, insects, reptiles and nonhuman animals often serve as a more practical template for automatons

The early signs of autism are visible in the brains of 6-month-old infants, a new study finds, suggesting that future treatments could be given at this time, to lessen the impact of the disorder on children. [More]

If you ever wondered how your body handled all those packaged ramen noodles you ate during college, this video s for you. Stefani Bardin , a TEDxManhattan fellow, wants to learn how digestion differs between food chock full of preservatives and food that can actually go bad in a day. To create this video, she and her collaborator swallowed a camera pill along with their meals (which included Gatorade and Gummi bears)

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By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine Difficulties in hiring and retaining women scientists and engineers are worrying universities. [More]

By Katherine Rowland of Nature magazine In the Congo Basin, Bayaka pygmies patrol their forests with handheld tracking devices. [More]

McGill researchers test a rat's pain threshold One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart. [More]

Apparently, humans aren't the only species whose relationships can suffer from stress.

Image courtesy of Save the Tasmanian Devil Program A killer cancer that is threatening to wipe Tasmanian devils off the map for good has been spreading from an original infected female 15 years ago via live cancer cells, according to evidence from genome sequences of the cancer and the animal, published online Thursday in Cell . Finding out how this happened could help save this species from extinction and it could also prepare researchers for the unlikely event that a contagious cancer ever appeared in humans. [More]

The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband [More]