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

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these tech

Some things never change.

Fritz Haber I’m haunted by one of the stories in the latest episode of Radiolab , can’t get it out of my head. Like everyone else, I love Radiolab and often sprinkle stories I learned from the show into cocktail party conversation (do I go to nerdy cocktail parties or do I make cocktail parties nerdy?), but the Bad Show was especially gripping, in particular the story of Fritz Haber . Haber was a German chemist working in the early 20th century, but his name is well known in Chemical Engineering departments (he is, after all, one of The Most Popular Chemical Engineers Ever .) I’ve even looked him up in wikipedia recently, focusing on the details of the chemical process he invented and never scrolling down to learn more about his life

Actor, playwright and journalist Anna Deavere Smith talks about the health care crisis and her play about people dealing with illness, health and the health care system, Let Me Down Easy . The performance can be streamed on the PBS website, PBS.org , as part of the Great Performances series. [More]

Across the animal kingdom, males are competitive when females are scarce. Now a study with people has examined how the number of women affects men’s attitudes about a marker for competitive fitness: Money. Basically, the fewer the women, the more the men threw their money around.

New York's emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials.

Early in the Space Age, little thought was given to objects left in orbit as part of satellite launches. But as the number of those objects has grown, at first steadily and then very rapidly, through the 50-plus years since the launch of Sputnik, concerns about the polluted orbital sphere have grown accordingly

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will construct an offshore wind farm with an installed capacity of 300 megawatts in its northern Hebei province, the largest such project undertaken by the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The wind farm, built with a total investment of 5.76 billion yuan ($913 million) will comprise of 100 units of 3 megawatts offshore turbines. It will be located near Puti Island in Bohai Sea.

A coordinated global campaign is monitoring a wayward Russian Mars probe that's slated to crash to Earth in the next few days, the European Space Agency has announced. [More]

By Kim Palmer Cleveland, Ohio (Reuters) - Alarmed over a string of earthquakes linked to deep wells in nearby Youngstown, authorities in Mansfield, Ohio have threatened to block construction of two similar waste disposal wells planned within their city limits. [More]

Magnifying glass, calipers, teeny tiny tape measure. These are the weapons with which researchers are fighting it out to find the world’s smallest frog.

POLOCHIC VALLEY, GUATEMALA--Echoes from armed raids still seem to resound in this valley, eight hours north of the capital city. In early 2011 military and paramilitary forces forcibly evicted 13 communities of indigenous Mayan peasants--some 300 families were dispossessed of disputed land they had been living on for three years to secure the property rights of one powerful local family, the Widmanns, and its agribusiness company Chabil Utzaj.

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine This month, scientists will test a new way to extract methane from beneath the frozen soil of Alaska: they will use waste carbon dioxide from conventional wells to force out the desired natural gas. The pilot experiment will explore the possibility of `mining' from gas hydrates: cages of water ice that hold molecules of methane

Those of you who read my blogs may know I am a staunch supporter of intellectual property rights. A great many creative works exist because intellectual property laws allow people to spend time creating when they’d otherwise work non-creative jobs to pay the rent. The internet has, on balance, been a marketing boon for content creators, especially for small artists who previously could only access buyers through layers of intermediaries.

AUSTIN, Texas Astrophysicists have a funny attitude toward magnetic fields. You might say they feel both repelled and attracted. Gravitation is assumed to rule the cosmos, so models typically neglect magnetism, which for most researchers is just as well, because the theory of magnetism has a forbidding reputation