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

It sounds like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale of horror . A man becomes agitated by strange sounds only to find that they are emanating from inside his own body--his heart, his pulse, the very movement of his eyes in their sockets. Yet superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a very real affliction caused by a small hole in the bone covering part of the inner ear .

Two months after al Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, analytical chemist John Butler found himself working late nights in his lab, developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero. Thinking back, he still clearly remembers the sense of rising to a national need that was shared by dozens of researchers recruited to the same difficult problem.

As the ship pulled out of port, a young man near me started humming the theme from Gilligan’s Island . I mentioned to him that the show would have been very different had the SS Minnow been carrying not a lone professor but--as our vessel was--a contingent of Nobel laureates. “Yeah,” he replied, “with everybody who’s here, we’d probably get off the island pretty quick.” This boat ride on Lake Constance, or the Bodensee as it is locally known, was part of the last day’s activities of the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany

By Shinichi Saoshiro TOKYO, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) [More]

[More]

Researchers analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll covering 2005 to 2009. They looked at religious affiliation, life satisfaction, social support and positive versus negative states of mind in 150 countries around the world. In societies that lack proper food, jobs, or health care, religious people are indeed happier than those who are not religious

Attempts to understand and control new synthetic recreational drugs are being hindered by analysis laboratories' inability to obtain pure samples of the compounds, experts say. [More]

Handwashing is the best way to avoid spreading infection, according to the CDC. But doctors, nurses and hospital staff wash up less than half as often as they should. Some hospitals encourage handwashing by posting signs that tell docs a simple scrub will prevent them from getting sick.

Publication of the genome of the North American green anole lizard has filled a yawning genome-sequence gap in the animal lineage. The paper, which appears today in Nature , is the first to sequence the genome of a non-avian reptile. "This fills out a clade that has been completely ignored before," says lead author Jessica Alf

I recently had the privilege of being asked to participate in a project called “Story Collider.” The goal is to revive the art and joy of storytelling, but in this case the story tellers are scientists and the audience is the general public. [More]

The space shuttle era is finished, its vehicles museum-bound . The deep-space forays of Apollo astronauts are long gone, their final moon voyage nearly 40 years in the past

Does a blind person reading Braille process words in the brain differently than a person who reads by sight?

[More]

How do people value a better life? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently released the Better Life Index, an interactive graphic that lets you rank 11 different dimensions (income, environment, life satisfaction, etc.) to see how different countries perform, and then “share” your ranking

Deadly accidents involving nuclear reactors, oil rigs and coal mines in recent months remind us that all forms of energy generation carry risks. In developed countries, coal is the most hazardous ( bottom left ), according to the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, which studied more than 1,800 accidents worldwide over nearly 30 years. For coal, mining tends to be the most dangerous step; for oil and gas, most accidents occur during distribution; and for nuclear, generating plants are on the hot seat ( orange bars )