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

[More]

From Nature magazine [More]

If Venus's pass across the sun earlier this week yields a bounty of information for hunters of transiting worlds in other planetary systems, it's because Venus is a known entity. Studying the June 5 Venus transit as if it were a faraway exoplanet "gives us a reality check," says planetary physicist Colin Wilson of the University of Oxford. "We can check on all those exoplanet techniques to see how accurate they really are." Such data may enhance NASA's Kepler mission as well as the many ground-based campaigns using planetary transits to identify distant worlds, a method that has led to the discovery or characterization of more than 200 exoplanets.

From Nature magazine [More]

Vampire spiders, as the name suggests, like blood. And they feast on blood-filled mosquitoes to get it.

It s World Oceans Day today (in North Carolina it s No It s Not! Day), so the moment seemed opportune for a very brief followup on the Plugged-In post of a week or so ago about the NC state legislature considering a law that would make it all kinds of illegal for you to try to figure out what the ocean was likely to do in the next century.

Scientists who traveled to the Arctic on a NASA research cruise last summer were looking for signs of climate change. What they found was a secret world hidden beneath the region's cap of sea ice. [More]

The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--And How You Can Change Them [More]

Day-Glo Velocirabbit / Bacteriograph of Albasaurus, E. coli genetically modified to express GFP Zachary Copfer Bioart at first seemed to be such a novelty. [More]

Deforestation in the Amazon has put nearly 100 bird species at greater risk of extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced (IUCN) on Thursday. The news comes in conjunction with the release of the 2012 update on the world’s bird species for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species , data for which is compiled and updated every four years by conservation group BirdLife International . Among the species at risk in the Amazon are the now-critically endangered Rio Branco antbird ( Cercomacra carbonaria ), which was listed as “Near Threatened” just four years ago

Think donning an Armani knockoff or phony Prada only hurts the fashion industry? Take another look in the mirror By Dan Ariely* [More]

Rafflesia cantleyi , perhaps better known as the corpse flower for its pungent scent, steals everything from its host. Though each blossom can be in excess of three feet across, the massive buds cannot support themselves, and have no leaves, stalks or true roots

More than 40 percent of men in the U.S. will show signs of male-pattern baldness sometime between the ages of 18 and 49. But studies looking at the genomes of this group of men have failed to turn up a genetic cause, which makes a true cure seem an unlikely prospect.

Stunning footage of comb jellies captured at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

(Reuters) - Environmental groups filed suit on Thursday seeking federal regulation of lead in ammunition, claiming exposure to the toxic metal from spent bullets fired into the environment by hunters kills millions of birds and poses a risk to human health. The Center for Biological Diversity was among 100 organizations that this year unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S