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

Pop quiz: True or false? [More]

It’s one of the great frustrations of obstetric medicine: humans have been reproducing for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet doctors still haven't unraveled the mystery of why some women give birth well before their babies have fully developed in the womb. Despite researchers' and physicians' best efforts, the rate of preterm births--defined as babies born before 37 weeks of gestation--climbed 30 percent from 1981 through 2006.

Venus is Earth's closest sibling, in terms of size and proximity, but it remains relatively little explored compared with Earth's other planetary neighbor, Mars. For instance, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) currently have three working Mars orbiters and one active Mars rover between them, whereas at Venus, ESA's Venus Express spacecraft has the place to itself

Urgent efforts to avert a government shutdown at midnight faltered yesterday over Republican initiatives to freeze climate rules, a challenge to the president's environmental priorities at the outset of his re-election bid. Controversial policy provisions meant to defund U.S

Dear EarthTalk : Were Japan to close all its nuclear plants following the recent damage and radiation leaks from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, what would its energy mix look like?

On April 8, 1911, at the Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory in the Netherlands, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his collaborators immersed a mercury capillary in liquid helium and saw the mercury's electrical resistance drop to nothing once the temperature reached about 3 kelvins, or 3 degrees above absolute zero (around –270 Celsius). This phenomenon of "superconductivity" was one of the first quantum phenomena to be discovered, although back then quantum theory did not exist. In subsequent decades theoreticians were able to put quantum physics on a solid foundation and explain superconductivity.

When you hear about asteroids close to the Earth, you probably have visions of collisions and extinctions and a postapocalyptic future. Or of brave space cowboys trying to knock them off course. You probably don’t picture a puppy that’s followed you home

California is home to many natural wonders due to its varied climate and topography which includes both forest and costal lands. For the July 6, 1901 issue of Scientific American , author, big-game fisher, and former curator at the American Museum of Natural History Charles F. Holder wrote a piece on some of the interesting and beautiful results of erosion on California’s Southern coast

Just after sunrise in early January, a delivery van trundled along a suburban street in Queensland, Australia.

Disagreeing On Everything As theoretical physicists, we deplore the publication of A. Garrett Lisi and James Owen Weatherall’s “ A Geometric Theory of Everything ,” as well as of Zeeya Merali’s “Rummaging for a Final Theory” [News Scan] in the September issue, which was PR-level praise of Lisi’s research that presented him as struggling against an entrenched establishment. [More]

Daydreaming may boost creativity, but a new study from psychologists at Harvard University suggests that letting your mind wander may also lead to unhappiness. [More]

There’s been a lot of confusion and concern about radiation in the past few weeks. As part of the Building a Better Explainer project at NYU’s Studio 20 , we decided to create a visual explainer of radiation levels, inspired by some recent presentations over at XKCD and Information is Beautiful .

Name: Hilary Mason Title: Chief scientist, bit.ly [More]

By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib of Nature magazine Cancer patients desperate to get into government run clinical trials will be sidelined.

TOKYO, April 8 (Reuters) - Following are main developmentsafter a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated northeast [More]