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

One of the nation's largest coal-burning utilities said yesterday it will shutter 18 of its coal-fired boilers and pay billions to rein in pollutants at many of its remaining units, underscoring the evolving energy landscape in the United States.

Dear EarthTalk : We have an invasion of phragmites in the wetlands bordering our neighborhood. I understand they are a non-native plant that, if left unchecked, will overrun the whole ecosystem. How does one remedy this situation in an eco-friendly way?

The Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris was one of the most well known in the city and its grounds were in high demand by those wishing to be buried in a Christian graveyard between the 12th and 18th centuries.

The world's largest forest antelope faces almost certain extinction in the wild in as few as 14 years if current population trends continue, according to a statement by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). Just 103 critically endangered mountain bongos (Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci) remain in Kenya, the last country where the animals exist in the wild. They live in four scattered and isolated groups, the largest of which numbers 50 individuals.

All parents struggle to find the right balance between encouragement and discipline when it comes to raising their kids.

By Anna Driver and Matthew Bigg VENICE, La./WAVELAND, Mississippi (Reuters) - When a BP oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico last April, killing 11 workers, authorities first reported that no crude was leaking into the ocean. [More]

The fact that he'd stopped crying scared me. Damn rear-facing car seat.

What could the study of infectious disease teach us about the 2008 financial crisis? Plenty, argue University of Oxford ecologist Robert M. [More]

Carmela Cuomo thought she had the secret within reach, hidden in a shallow black tank at the NOAA marine fisheries laboratory in Milford, Conn. The horseshoe crabs she had plucked from New Haven Harbor in 2000 trundled about their springtime ritual, digging pits in the sand, laying their eggs and fertilizing them.

Workers at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant fighting to keep additional radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium and other harmful elements from being released into the environment are monitored daily for exposure to radiation. The same is true of the police and firefighters scouring the area within 10 kilometers of the plant for missing people. [More]

By Sid Perkins for Nature magazine Beginning in late 2004, a flurry of massive, tsunami-spawning earthquakes have rocked the world, first slamming Indonesia, then Chile and most recently Japan. [More]

When your stomach’s empty, it pumps out the hormone ghrelin, to whet your appetite and get your juices flowing. But ghrelin doesn’t just make you crave a bite. It helps you track it down too--by sharpening your sense of smell.

A major dark matter experiment has taken a swipe with its technological net in the hopes of catching some of the elusive particles that make up the universe's missing mass, and once again that net has come up empty. But in swiping and missing, the Xenon100 experiment has closed in a bit tighter on where dark matter--the invisible stuff theorized to outweigh the ordinary matter in the universe by a factor of five--might be hiding. [More]

Following the motions of a specific molecule inside a cell is no easy task In "Too Hard For Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

Do animals give much thought to voluntary behavior? Before you or I reach for a cup of coffee, we make a conscious--even if barely so--decision to do it