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

Life is too complex to be described by a simple food chain. Food webs offer a three-dimensional representation of predator–prey relationships within a habitat, providing a more nuanced view of the myriad connections between species

Humans have harvested the sea for tens of thousands of years, but only in the past few centuries have we begun to take a big toll on ecosystems. The two food webs below show predatory relationships among life-forms in the northern Adriatic Sea.

Why is the far side of the moon on, well, the far side of the moon? [More]

Fruit and veggies don’t just improve your diet--they could enhance your looks. A new study, done with primarily Caucasian subjects, finds that eating produce heightens red and yellow skin tones, which increases attractiveness.

In the chilling scenario that a tornado warning is issued for your area, what do the experts feel are the best choices for avoiding serious injury or loss of life? [More]

AUSTIN, Texas Use your brain to control the world. That’s the promise of the brain-machine interface , a system that directly translates your thoughts into actions. Here at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova, technologists from the Near Future Laboratory , have showed how popular culture has explored the possibilities of the devices for both good and evil and how researchers are making the technology a reality today.

Any computer gamer old enough to remember floppy disks probably paid at least a fleeting visit to SimCity, the legendary franchise that let players build -- and destroy -- the metropolises of their imaginations. After passing through half a dozen incarnations in the two decades since its debut, the game is back, and its creator, Maxis Studios, says that this time, it's putting more than bricks and mortar into the mix

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based non-governmental organization (NGO) that defends journalists and fights censorship, on Monday added the governments of Bahrain and Belarus to its 2012 list of Internet Enemies an inventory of governments worldwide that filter online content, restrict their citizens’ Internet access, track cyber dissidents and use the Web to spread pro-government propaganda while smearing opposition. These countries join other governments that the NGO has cited as cyber oppressors, including Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. Bahrain, whose population of 1.2 million people reside an area roughly the size of Washington, D.C., experienced an uprising last February as part of the Arab Spring protests throughout the Middle East and northern Africa

By Richard Van Noorden of Nature magazine The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz's laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity. Into each mollusk, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the glucose and oxygen in the snail's blood. [More]

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Many meat-eating animals have lost their ability to taste sugars over the course of evolution. Sea mammals, spotted hyenas and other carnivores have all shed a working copy of a gene that encodes a `taste receptor' that senses sugars, finds a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . An animal with a diet devoid of vegetables may have little need to detect sugars, says Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the study.

By Stephen Strauss of Nature magazine The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics. The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species.

The more scientists discover about desert ants, the more impressive they seem. Decades of research have established that ants use path integration – an innate form of mental trigonometry – in order to navigate the visually featureless environments that are the salt pans of Tunisia.

By Ari Rabinovitch and Rinat Harash JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Completing the same journey they have made for the past 2,000 years, a flock of swifts has flown halfway around the world to nest among the ancient stones of Jerusalem's Western Wall. The scores of small black birds who spend the spring flying high above Jerusalem's Old City and laying eggs in the cracks in the wall, where it is common for visitors to place prayer notes, have become a focus in efforts to rehabilitate the species' diminishing population worldwide

A droplet of water suspended on an iPhone camera acts as a magnifying lens. I’ve engineered a fair number of inexpensive DIY camera hacks. This one is by far the cheapest: it’s free! Simply place a drop of water on the phone’s lens, carefully turn the device over, and the suspended droplet serves as a liquid lens

Map of nuclear power reactors in the USA (image from the U.S.