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

Sulla, the world’s first talking robot, was so adept at conversation--in four languages, no less--that a human visitor to the laboratory in which she was created refused to believe she was not a real person. Alas, Sulla was not a real robot, either, but a character in Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R. , which introduced the word “robot” to the lexicon.

Name: Jean Schneider Title:

DNA from a mass grave found in Athens in the mid-1990s helped experts identify typhoid fever as a possible source of the plague that killed off one quarter of the city’s population in the fifth century

Mangroves are tangled orchards of spindly shrubs that thrive in the interface between land and sea. They bloom in muddy soil where the water is briny and shallow, and the air muggy

The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized four student inventors Wednesday poised to make a profound impact in the areas of disease diagnostics, drug development, assistive devices such as wheelchairs, and security screening for explosives

By Marian Turner Attaching chemotherapy drugs to small particles called nanodiamonds can make the drugs more effective, according to a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine . Anticancer drugs tend to become ineffective because cancer cells quickly pump them out before they have had time to do their work.

By Zo

Dear EarthTalk : I understand that Congress passed legislation not too long ago that protected a few million acres of wilderness areas, parks and wild rivers, in part to help offset climate change.

Dear EarthTalk : I understand that Congress passed legislation not too long ago that protected a few million acres of wilderness areas, parks and wild rivers, in part to help offset climate change. How does conserving land prevent global warming?-- M. Oakes, Charlottesville, N.C

Atheists The best thing about writing a story as a journalist is that you get to interact with astute readers who are never reticient about telling you what you missed in your reporting. My story, “ The Neuroscience of True Grit ,” the cover in the current issue, talks about what we know, and what we’re still trying to find out, about psychological resilience: the thing that

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The 2010 Russian heat wave that killed thousands and cut into that country's grain harvest was primarily due to natural variability, not human-spurred climate change, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday. [More]

NEW YORK CITY--Amid a panel discussion about string theory and other candidates for the theory of everything--the long-sought system that would unify the four forces of physics--Brian Greene said something that sounded a bit curious. "If you asked me, 'Do I believe in string theory?'" began Greene, one of string theory's most famous proponents

Last verifiably seen in 1938, when the final "ghost cat" was shot and killed in Maine, the eastern cougar ( Puma concolor couguar ) has now been declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)

It took space shuttle Discovery several months to get off the ground on its final mission, but the shuttle's landing came off without a hitch. Discovery touched down on schedule, just before noon March 9, putting an end to its 26 years of service, in which the orbiter made 39 trips to space and logged more than 230 million kilometers. [More]

Can cleaner sources of energy not only power our economy but also drive a recovery from the Great Recession? That's the question confronted by policymakers across the U.S.--and by debaters in the Intelligence Squared series hosted March 8 by New York University. [More]