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

By Barbara Lewis and Henning Gloystein LONDON/DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - The accelerating dash for natural gas risks a bitter backlash as the environmental cost of exploiting new shale deposits and of transporting it in liquid form spoil its credentials as the greenest fossil fuel. [More]

While the bloggers are so prolific (you have to remember they had to wait several months until the launch, having blog posts all written and ready to go in advance) I feel I need to do these summaries almost daily. [More]

Medieval armor certainly looks heavy. And now researchers have demonstrated how the protection might have unwittingly put its wearers at a heavy disadvantage on the battlefield. An armored combatant in the 1400s had between about 60-to-110-pounds of steel on his head and body

by Chloe McIver of Nature magazine Turtles should sit on the same branch of the tree of life as lizards, according to a genetic analysis that could clear up a long-standing mystery over the creature's origin. Palaeontologists have long used morphological data, obtained by looking closely at the physical characteristics of fossils and living relatives, to show the evolutionary relationship between different species.

NASA has picked the final landing site for its next Red Planet rover after years of debate and will unveil its choice on Friday (July 22) -- nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency's storied Viking 1 probe touched down on Mars, agency officials said.

A recently described swarm of fossil insects unearthed from a 100 million-year-old South American formation are a Frankensteinian riot of mismatched parts: lengthy praying mantis-like front legs; long, slim wings like a dragonfly; and wing-vein patterns to match those of modern-day mayflies. So unusual is their form that scientists are cataloguing the creatures into a completely new taxonomic order.

With all of the discussion about future U.S.

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An iconic species of the American West, the whitebark pine, is at risk of extinction from climate change and disease, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Tuesday, but no immediate action is planned.

Until very recently, even Rupert Murdoch's sharpest critics might have admitted to envying the 80-year-old arch-conservative News Corporation CEO, who built a far-reaching media empire almost from scratch and made himself outstandingly rich even among billionaires. Now, though, amidst a phone hacking and corruption scandal that threatens to permanently damage his company, Murdoch is struggling to defend himself. Summoned to testify in front of a British Parliament committee investigating the scandal on Tuesday, he called it "the most humble day" of his career--and that was before a protester flung a shaving cream pie at his face

By Nic Fleming of Nature magazine The movement of cholesterol in and out of cells takes much longer than previously thought, according to new measurements of the phenomenon in artificial cell membranes. [More]

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine As the space shuttle glides through its final week, another arm of the US space program faces a bleak future. [More]

Despite common parlance, oil is not a singular substance but rather a toxic stew of many different hydrocarbons that comes out of the ground mixed with natural gas. The oil that spewed from BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico last year was no different--and now a precise measurement of its chemical composition has been published July 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

More than a quarter of American adults have what’s called poor health literacy. They're likely to have trouble interpreting important written health information --or have difficulties communicating well with doctors and nurses. But does that mean they're actually more likely to miss taking scheduled medications or get sick?

What will you find living in your backyard? [More]

LONDON -- David Stainforth is a brave man.