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

The tentacled snake may be the strangest serpent you've never heard of. [More]

We humans are pretty smug about our large brains and sophisticated ways. But if there is one thing I have learned as a biologist, it is to never underestimate the abilities of animals that most people consider primitive and simple-minded.

Let’s say you are trying to sell cookies for a school fundraiser at the local mall, and you want to pick the ideal spot to set up your table. You’d probably look for an area with a lot of traffic.

Early in his new book, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer (Crown Business, 2011), Duncan Watts tells a story about the late sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, who once described an intriguing research result: Soldiers from a rural background were happier during World War II than their urban comrades. Lazarsfeld imagined that on reflection people would find the result so self-evident that it didn't merit an elaborate study, because everyone knew that rural men were more used to grueling labor and harsh living standards. But there was a twist, the study he described showed the opposite pattern; it was urban conscripts who had adjusted better to wartime conditions

Artist, inventor and philosopher Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was without a doubt a genius. Yet, there is some criticism. In his book 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (William Morrow, 2008) British author and retired submarine commander Gavin Menzies claims that da Vinci swiped most of his ideas from the Chinese

By Yoko Nishikawa [More]

Natural disasters always seem to strike in the worst places. The Sendai earthquake has caused over 8,000 deaths, destroyed 450,000 people’s homes, crippled four nuclear reactors and wreaked over $300 billion in damage. And it’s only the latest disaster.

NEW YORK CITY--Who brewed--and then enjoyed--the first beer? The civilization responsible for the widely beloved beverage must have been a very old one, but we don't yet know who first brewed up a batch of beer, Christine Hastorf explained in a March 10 lecture at New York University on the archaeology of beer

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1960--the same year that a U.S.

Living and working in the high Arctic at this time of year is full of challenges. From the small everyday stuff like sleeping, washing and using the toilet, to the bigger issues that affect our science such as icing up of instruments, freezing of your water samples and keeping a hole in the ice open when the air temperature is -37 o C.

NEW YORK -- Could coal be the key to manufacturing lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, including electric cars? It may seem counterintuitive to use coal to reduce a vehicle's fuel consumption, and thus its CO2 output. But one scientist at a New York technical school thinks he's found a way, and hopes to market it to automakers and the growing electric vehicle industry.

If you're ever at a loss for conversation amid a group of information-graphics professionals, bring up the topic of pie charts or proportional circles.

Boreal forests across the Northern hemisphere are undergoing rapid, transformative shifts as a result of a warming climate that, in some cases, is triggering feedback loops producing even more regional warming, according to several new studies. Russia's boreal forest - the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world - has seen a transformation in recent years from larch to conifer trees, according to new research by University of Virginia researchers. [More]

Airplane manufacturers have been changing over from aluminum to advanced composite materials. These lighter, stronger composites are made of fibers of carbon or glass embedded in a second material, often plastic

There may be no scientist more obscure relative to his immense accomplishments than Claude Elwood Shannon, who died just over a decade ago, on February 24, 2001, at the age of 84. Shannon was not only the creator of information theory, which provides the mathematical framework that makes digital communications possible (and which I discussed in a recent post )