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

RALEIGH, N.C. Does writing about climate change or childhood vaccinations necessarily mean you’ve got an agenda? That’s one of the questions tackled at last week’s ScienceOnline 2012 meeting, a gathering of some 450 scientists, bloggers, scientist-bloggers, journalists and other communicators on the campus of North Carolina State University.

A strange bacterium found in California’s Mono Lake cannot replace the phosphorus in its DNA with arsenic, according to researchers who have been trying to reproduce the results of a controversial report published in Science in 2010. [More]

Gary Marcus suffers from what a friend jokingly describes as congenital arrhythmia--the inability, despite many hours of his youth spent practicing and taking lessons, to learn to play a musical instrument. A few years ago Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, decided at 38 to make one last try when he took up guitar. No surprise: He did not succeed in becoming the next Jimi Hendrix, but managed to acquire a modicum of skill--and went on to describe his experience in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions [More]

The Dog-Bark Snake Bot You've probably heard of robot snakes before, useful in search-and-rescue scenarios because they can worm their way into confined spaces--perhaps in collapsed buildings--that other machines can't match. You may also know SAR teams sometimes use sniffer dogs to help them locate victims trapped in rubble. But you've probably never conflated these two notions, and pictured a SAR dog that has a slave snake-bot that it can deploy and control with a bark.

By Eric Hand of Nature Magazine On 4 January, John Grunsfeld, the fix-it-man for the Hubble Space Telescope, became the head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. [More]

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education , long the nation's leading defender of evolution education, discusses the NCSE's new initiative for climate science education. [More]

The National Center for Science Education is a wonderful institution dedicated to fighting junk science from entering our Nation’s schools and media. This is a tireless and often thankless job, yet there are so few “think tank” type organizations to promote science standards out there that they really stand out. I had the fortune 2 years ago to visit their offices and was impressed by how passionate the staff were and what they could accomplish out of a tiny office and a garage to store their immense archives

The transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms was one of the most significant developments in the history of life on Earth. Without it, all living things would still be microscopic and simple; there would be no such thing as a plant or a brain or a human. How exactly multicellularity arose is still a mystery, but a new study, published January 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science s, found that it may have been quicker and easier than many scientists expected.

Ayurveda, which is a holistic ancient perception passed on by learned Sages of India, have endowed our health and longevity with the virtues of Natural wellness since times immemorial. Derived from the two meaningful lexis Ayus and Veda which when ...

Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses just twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a whole byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms. A modern hard drive, for comparison, still needs more than half a billion atoms per byte

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results.

Bats have an image problem.

Ever wondered why mosquitoes eat some people up but leave others relatively unscathed?

2011 has been a busy year for particle physicists. They’ve found a new particle , closed in on the elusive Higgs boson , and witnessed some neutrinos acting pretty strangely, amongst other things.