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

Used to be, if parents wanted to know what their kids were up to, they’d just rummage through their dresser drawers. But now parents take advantage of social network spying solutions. [More]

The single biggest factor, by far, in reducing the rate of death among children younger than five is greater education for women. In all countries worldwide, whether females increase schooling from 10 years to 11, say, or two years to three, infant mortality declines , according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington

The brain usually has a pretty good idea of what is part of the body and what is not--although the classic rubber hand illusion can convince people to adopt a fake hand as their own when one of their real hands is hidden from view. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have added a strange new twist to this experiment, persuading volunteers to believe that they have three hands rather than two. The psychologists accomplished this sensory legerdemain by placing a false rubber right hand next to the subject’s real right hand and covering both with a cloth from the wrist up (to obscure which one was connected to the body)

NASA's shuttle program, set to make its final flight later this week, has resulted in the death of 14 astronauts. But it could have been a lot worse.

For years health officials have thrown money at ways to prevent young children from dying, with little global data on effectiveness. Recently a pattern has emerged: mortality drops in proportion to the years of schooling that women attain

(Adds governor's letter to company) By Emilie Ritter [More]

(Chirping sound.) That may not sound like much – but it’s the loudest animal in the world. For its size, that is. The insect called the water boatman is two millimeters long.

Claims about the positive effects of debt warrant a closer look

Here's a great video primer on how auroras form, from Per Byhring and the physics department at the University of Oslo. With wonderful graphics, the nearly five-minute-long video details the origin of the solar storms that trigger the Northern and Southern lights

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine A controversial new study is questioning the oft-repeated connection between the consumption of too much salt and the development of cardiovascular disease.

By Sid Perkins of Nature magazine Evidence of historical irregularities in the motions of both the Indian and African tectonic plates bolsters the contention that plumes of hot rock rising from deep within Earth's mantle can drive the planet's tectonic plates. About 68 million years ago, the tectonic plate that includes the Indian subcontinent--which, at that time, had yet to slam into southern Asia--lay northeast of Madagascar and was moving north-eastward at a tectonically typical few centimeters per year. [More]

Deep in the Silurian seas, some 420 million years ago, a strange structure had just emerged in the bodies of many new vertebrates. Some fish began developing a defined upper and lower jaw that allowed them to devour large and hard-shelled organisms

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine The most direct evidence yet for ancient photosynthesis has been uncovered in a fossil of a matted carpet of microbes that lived on a beach 3.3 billion years ago. Frances Westall at the Centre for Molecular Biophysics, a laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Orleans and her colleagues looked at the well-preserved Josefsdal Chert microbial mat--a thin sheet formed by layer upon layer of tiny organisms--from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. These layers of ancient microorganisms grew at a time when Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council will debate climate change for the second time in four years, its current chair announced yesterday. The July 20 discussion, led by the German government, will be a repeat of a 2007 attempt by the United Kingdom to put climate change on the council's agenda