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

Three months ago, I received an email informing me that a high school friend, Pat, had died.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine In 2008, the world's media was captivated by a study apparently showing that cows like to align themselves with magnetic fields. [More]

When the ensemble of cesium beam and hydrogen maser atomic clocks strike 11:11 today at Boulder’s National Institute of Standards and Time nothing will happen. Never mind the fact that the numbers are both binary and identical and that the square of any cluster of 1′s is going to be palindromic as well.

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. But the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm , a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with corn earworms ).

In the series “A Modest Proposal,” my colleagues and I will propose inventions and projects that I think are eminently doable and would love made real. A Star Trek communicator badge [More]

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom. Crown Business, 2011 [More]

The Advances section of Scientific American 's November issue took readers into the air with the world's highest flying geese, back in time with an unlikely ancestor, into space to rendezvous with some garbage, to the Internet for a new way of conducting clinical trials, and beyond. For readers interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of further background material follows: "On the Trail of Space Trash" [More]

The series Too Hard for Science? discusses ideas scientists would love to explore that they think are difficult or impossible to investigate. The Scientist: Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School

The serene waters of sky pond, one of the most popular tourist attractions in northeastern Asia, belie the fact that it is nestled inside the crater of one of the region’s most dangerous volcanoes--a peak known as Changbai Mountain to the Chinese and Mount Paektu to Koreans. That 2,744-meter-tall volcano, which straddles the border between China and North Korea, last erupted in 1903 but has displayed signs of awakening in recent years.

Funding science has always relied on public support. Traditionally, scientists at research institutions are awarded money from government agencies and sometimes private foundations.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's air pollution standards are too lax, a senior environment official said in comments published on Friday, the highest level comment following complaints that authorities are understating the extent of smog that often envelops Beijing. The level of air pollution in the capital varies, depending on winds. But in recent weeks, a cocktail of smokestack emissions, vehicle exhaust, dust and aerosols have blanketed the city in a pungent, beige shroud for days on end, prompting residents to denounce official readings of "slight" pollution as a gross undercount

The Killer Bacteria Hall of Fame no doubt houses the usual suspects: Yersinia pestis , perpetrator of the Plague; Treponema pallidum, the spiral-shaped culprit in syphilis ; and Vibrio cholerae , the swimmer that causes cholera .

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on security and privacy during the age of drone warfare. The year is 2020. Two Air Force officers sit in a darkened control center at an Air Force base in Nevada, carefully watching a bank of computer screens.

When it comes to treating pediatric cancer a group of academic researchers, oncologists and pathologists believes that a more personal approach isn’t just more humane, it’s the key to survival. For members of the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium (NMTRC) this personal touch means using genomic analysis to develop highly targeted therapies to treat each individual tumor.

Norman F. Ramsey may not be a household name, but he was a giant of 20th-century experimental physics.