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

Learn about city pigeons, watch pigeons for science, learn cool facts, and increase your awareness of nature in your neighborhood [More]

Our brains are exquisitely tuned to perceive, recognize and remember faces. We can easily find a friend’s face among dozens or hundreds of unfamiliar faces in a busy street. We look at each other’s facial expressions for signs of appreciation and disapproval, love and contempt

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Some are as large and fast as commercial airplanes. Some are blimps that sit in the sky, surveying broad swaths of territory. Others flit around imperceptibly, like birds or insects, recording videos and landing themselves.

By now it is common knowledge that being severely overweight puts people at increased risk of suffering from heart disease, stroke and diabetes and that obesity--defined as weighing at least 20 percent more than the high side of normal--is on the rise.

After 30 years in Fairbanks, Alaska, we finally wimped-out and went to Hawaii at Christmas instead of our cabin. The cabin is in a remote mountain valley and gets no direct sun this time of year, and the temperature hovers around -20 F. Truth be told, on most mid-winter trips to the cabin we sleep a lot

One hundred and eleven years ago today – on January 10, 1901 – an oil gusher rang in a new era in energy leadership. This was the day when a plume of oil surged almost 100 feet into the air at Lucas No. 1, at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas

Boosting voter turnout could be as simple as making individuals see voting as part of who they are rather than as something they do. [More]

Voters in the recent Iowa caucuses and Tuesday's New Hampshire primary will rely on paper ballots as they have for generations. In the very next primary on January 21, South Carolinians will vote with backlit touch-screen computers. [More]

Did Earth once have two moons? It may take two lunar spacecraft to find out.

After Haiti’s earthquake two years ago, cholera swept the country. And within a month, the same strain had spread to the Dominican Republic and the U.S., and then to Venezuela, Mexico, Spain, and Canada. [More]

Microbes kept the oil and gas spewing from the Macondo well from becoming even more of a disaster, preventing the Deepwater Horizon blowout from deeply befouling the Gulf coast . But these hydrocarbon-chompers got an assist from the Gulf of Mexico the prevailing tides and currents helped keep hydrocarbon-eating microbes on the job, according to the results of a new model published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 9. Simply put, the study sought to answer the question: how did five families of bacteria keep 4.1 million barrels of oil (and billions of cubic feet of natural gas) from becoming a bigger disaster

Just before the holidays, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes — who wrote the definitive history of the Manhattan Project with The Making of the Atomic Bomb — published a new biography of film star Hedy Lamar: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr . Why

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine Protective caps known as telomeres that help to preserve the integrity of chromosomes can also predict lifespan in young zebra finches ( Taeniopygia guttata ), researchers have found. Telomeres are stretches of repetitive DNA sequence that are found at the ends of chromosomes, where they help to maintain cell viability by preventing the fraying of DNA and the fusion of one chromosome to another

By Katherine Rowland of Nature magazine Carnivorous plants catch their prey in pools, glue and snap traps. [More]