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

By Robert Birsel BANGKOK (Reuters) - Authorities in the Thai capital repaired a damaged flood gate on Wednesday that has become the focus of anger, fear and rivalry between arms of government battling the country's worst floods in decades. [More]

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine The e-mail that ended one career for Alison Singer, but started another, arrived as she was cooking dinner for her daughters one evening in January 2009. [More]

New data from a national math test show that U.S.

Venice's Church of the Most Holy Redeemer has held a musical celebration every year since its construction in 1592. And recently, the church has inspired debate among historians: How could its echoing chambers clearly portray the complicated music performed during the festival

By Mary Ellen Godin MERIDEN, Connecticut (Reuters) - Cold, tired and frustrated, residents of more than 1.6 million homes in the Northeast remained without power on Tuesday and some were told it could take 10 more days to restore electricity after the rare and deadly October snowstorm. [More]

Look for a PBS NewsHour story on X-ray body scanners, reported in conjunction with ProPublica, to air later this month. [More]

An economic chill will soon arrive in the world market that provides the batteries that power electric cars. [More]

University students via for a chance to install their instruments on the next NASA science balloon [More]

On November 8th, Earth will have a close encounter with a sizable asteroid. But not too close, thankfully

By Risa Maeda TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese utilities will largely avoid power shortages this winter despite prolonged reactor shutdowns amid public concerns over nuclear safety, but hurdles remain for next summer, the government said on Tuesday. [More]

A new report warns that the exploding usage of radio waves by broadband-devouring smartphones and video threatens to deplete a finite wireless spectrum . “If you look at traffic patterns over the past five years, we went from things like illegal music downloads, to legal music downloads, to video,” said technology adviser and report author Michael Kleeman at University of California San Diego

Earlier today, LOT Polish airlines flight 16 traveling from Newark, N.J., to Warsaw, Poland, crash landed after its landing gear failed to deploy. According to The Aviation Herald , the Boeing 767-300 was at 3,000 feet when the pilots reported an unsafe gear indication

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine When colleagues called the work of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel too good to be true, they meant it as a compliment. [More]

In Google Maps , the distance-measuring tool offers a choice of three unit systems: Metric, English or “I’m Feeling Geeky.” If you click the third one, you’re offered a long list of, ahem, somewhat uncommon measurement units, including parsecs, Persian cubits, and Olympic swimming pools. Mac OS X’s text-to-speech feature, meanwhile, lets you endow your Mac with any of dozens of different human voices. Each speaks a funny sample sentence.

These days, software engineers’ overlords generally don’t tolerate true, secret Easter eggs. The bosses argue that such surprises are untested, may be incompatible with the software company’s public image, and (when they feature the programmers’ names) amount to “poach me!” ads for rival companies’ headhunters.