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

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russia completed Friday the multi-billion-dollar construction of an abandoned Soviet-era dam complex in St Petersburg to protect its former imperial capital from potentially devastating floods. The project was launched in 1979 but was abandoned and left to ruin after it proved too costly following the 1991 Communist collapse. [More]

This summer has seen the release of a blockbuster movie, acclaimed documentary and news-worthy research paper that all--in different but weirdly complementary ways--present sympathetic portraits of chimpanzees, our hirsute doppelgangers. [More]

By Yuko Inoue and Julie Gordon TOKYO/TORONTO (Reuters) - Japanese manufacturers concerned about China's restrictive export quotas on essential rare earths may have found a way to resolve their supply concerns -- relocate production to China. [More]

Dear EarthTalk : I don’t hear much about the environmental impacts of our consumer culture any more, but it seems to me that our “buy, buy, buy” mentality is a major contributor to our overuse of energy and resources.

Warning that famine in Somalia is likely to get worse before it gets better, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday pledged an additional $17 million in U.S. aid to East African countries racked by the worst drought in 60 years.

Regular readers will know that I often avoid discussing new palaeontological discoveries at Tet Zoo, the exceptions being those where I was personally involved (hmm). [More]

Brain: The Inside Story Through August 14, 2011 [More]

Red Planet Mars Life Lawrence M. Krauss’s “ Rethinking the Dream ” [Forum] rightly points out that the benefits of flying humans in space have not been commensurate with the cost, especially when human flight is compared with advanced robotic or automatic systems that can do many of the same tasks at one tenth of the cost and with no risk to humans.

BEIJING (Reuters) - ConocoPhillips China, a subsidiary of the Houston-based oil company ConocoPhillips, said on Friday that as much as 2,500 barrels of oil and mud leaked from an oilfield in China's northern Bohai Bay. A recent survey at the C platform of Penglai 19-3 oil field identified more oil-based drilling mud on the sea floor than originally estimated, the company said on its website (www.conocophillips.com.cn), adding that it expected to complete a cleanup by the end of this month.

This is not a climate science blog, nor is it a political or media critique blog.

When I was getting my solar panels installed, I couldn’t wait to see my electric meter literally spin backwards. [More]

By Zo

You might think that temporary tattoos look cool, but what if they could also collect and transmit information about your heart rate , temperature, muscle contractions or brain waves? [More]

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine On 11 March, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) warned that a 3-metre-plus tsunami would hit northeastern Japan.

A new OpenNet Initiative study has found that internet censorship is prevalent in Muslim-majority countries...