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

Dear EarthTalk: Is air quality in the United States improving or getting worse? Is it cleaner in some parts of the country than in others?

Collecting all digital data on people could yield key insights into our nature, but violate privacy In "Too Hard For Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated.

Why can most people remember a color, but only a few can remember pitch? --David Hardie, Perth, Australia [More]

For more than a century biologists made great strides in understanding the complex tapestry of life by tracing the smaller and shorter threads in its many patterns. This reductionist approach, which breaks complicated processes into their component parts to understand them better, has produced extraordinary advances. We take it for granted, for example, that DNA molecules--and not proteins--carry our genetic information, but that was a matter of huge debate and study in the early 20th century.

Aids researchers and advocates were devastated in 2007, when a much anticipated vaccine against HIV unexpectedly failed to protect anyone in a clinical trial of 3,000 people. Even worse, the experimental inoculation, developed with money from the Merck pharmaceutical company and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, actually increased the chances that some people would later acquire HIV

Ever since Johannes Kepler traipsed over half of Europe wooing aristocratic patrons, scientists have grumbled about money.

It may still sound futuristic, but the era of mind-controlled machines is here. An electrode is implanted in or sits on top of the brain, and records patterns of neurons firing; this pattern is then translated, via an algorithm, into computer language

[More]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Serious safety lapses by oil rig owner and operator Transocean Ltd contributed to the massive blowout and spill at a BP Plc well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said in a report on the 2010 disaster.

Europeans ate their way through the island nation of Mauritius , most famously eliminating the dodo bird. Less well known was their effect on the island now known as Ile aux Aigrettes or Island of White Herons, where they exterminated giant skinks and tortoises, and logged the native ebony trees for firewood

The hunt for extraterrestrial life just lost one of its best tools. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a field of radio dishes in rural northern California built to seek out transmissions from distant alien civilizations, has been shuttered, at least temporarily, as its operators scramble to find a way to continue to fund it.

One might think that it would be hard to hide a star some 500,000 times more radiant than the sun, but distance and dust seem to have conspired to do just that.

Hybrid cars have become so eco-friendly they now trump at least one form of human locomotion. [More]

[More]

Most plants capture sunlight.