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

In July 2010, the editorial department of Scientific American where at the time I was on staff received a review copy of a book was slated to come out in September. It was a slim, drab-looking, paperback-bound volume, still without a cover design or page numbers

The raging combatants form a blur on all sides.

When people over 65 show losses in their short-term memory and comprehension, it’s no surprise. But a new study claims that a general cognitive decline starts to set in as early as age 45. The research is in the British Medical Journal .

More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli--including, most recently, our immune system. [More]

By Marice Richter FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - It's official: 2011 was the driest year on record in Texas, according to the National Weather Service.

The short of it ( covered in depth by Michael Eisen , and Razib tipped me off to the issue ) is that Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money. Currently, any research funded by the National Institute of Health must be made freely available to the public 12 months after publication. You can see why for-profit publishing companies do not like this policy.

Stephen Hawking turns 70 on Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century.

They look like ordinary baby rhesus macaques , but Hex, Roku and Chimero are the world's first chimeric monkeys, each with cells from the genomes of as many as six rhesus monkeys. [More]

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results.

You say you’d love a fun science evening? Great, here s your chance

Ask many scientists what they believe separates the pursuit of scientific inquiry from most everything else and you’ll get a wide range of open-ended, flowery, idealistic, and nearly altruistic, statements like ”unlock the mysteries of the world”, “the thrill of discovery”, “making a meaningful contribution to society”, or “improving people’s lives”.

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important open problem in the mathematics of Sudoku , the game popularized in Japan that involves filling in a 9x9 grid of squares with the numbers 1-9 according to certain rules. Gary McGuire of University College Dublin shows in a proof posted online on January 1 that the minimum number of clues--or starting digits--needed to complete a puzzle is 17; puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not have a unique solution. [More]

Illuminate a piece of metal, such as copper or silver, and the electrons get excited .

Bats have an image problem.

Attending the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is like walking along a loud, crowded boardwalk on a hot summer day. There may not be much sun or sand, but amongst the thousands of tech peddlers who flock there each January, you’ll find no shortage of hype, hoopla and expensive gimmicks