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

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Fukushima task force has confronted the commissioners with a central quandary of their mission: When are nuclear plants safe enough? The six-person Near-Term Task Force that dived into the implications of Japan's nuclear disaster concluded in its July 12 report that "continued operation and continued licensing activities do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety." [More]

By Katy Migiro NAIROBI (Reuters) - The United Nations declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia Wednesday and said it could quickly spread unless donors took action.

Kaspersky Labs isn't as well known in the U.S. as Norton or Symantec, but the company is a major international provider of anti-virus tools

Every week, I will post a quick Q&A with one of our new bloggers on the network, so you can get to know them better. [More]

While the bloggers are so prolific (you have to remember they had to wait several months until the launch, having blog posts all written and ready to go in advance) I feel I need to do these summaries almost daily. [More]

Medieval armor certainly looks heavy. And now researchers have demonstrated how the protection might have unwittingly put its wearers at a heavy disadvantage on the battlefield. An armored combatant in the 1400s had between about 60-to-110-pounds of steel on his head and body

by Chloe McIver of Nature magazine Turtles should sit on the same branch of the tree of life as lizards, according to a genetic analysis that could clear up a long-standing mystery over the creature's origin. Palaeontologists have long used morphological data, obtained by looking closely at the physical characteristics of fossils and living relatives, to show the evolutionary relationship between different species.

A recently described swarm of fossil insects unearthed from a 100 million-year-old South American formation are a Frankensteinian riot of mismatched parts: lengthy praying mantis-like front legs; long, slim wings like a dragonfly; and wing-vein patterns to match those of modern-day mayflies. So unusual is their form that scientists are cataloguing the creatures into a completely new taxonomic order.

With all of the discussion about future U.S.

Until very recently, even Rupert Murdoch's sharpest critics might have admitted to envying the 80-year-old arch-conservative News Corporation CEO, who built a far-reaching media empire almost from scratch and made himself outstandingly rich even among billionaires. Now, though, amidst a phone hacking and corruption scandal that threatens to permanently damage his company, Murdoch is struggling to defend himself. Summoned to testify in front of a British Parliament committee investigating the scandal on Tuesday, he called it "the most humble day" of his career--and that was before a protester flung a shaving cream pie at his face

By Nic Fleming of Nature magazine The movement of cholesterol in and out of cells takes much longer than previously thought, according to new measurements of the phenomenon in artificial cell membranes. [More]

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine As the space shuttle glides through its final week, another arm of the US space program faces a bleak future. [More]

Meet the next great gonzo engineering project: A 20-mile Red Sea-spanning bridge connecting Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The bridge has been spoken about for years and multiple attempts to begin work on it have fallen through; overcoming the odds now will be a feat of both political finesse and engineering. Post-revolution Egypt is reportedly about to embark on an audacious joint construction project with Saudi Arabia: A bridge over the Red Sea that would link the two country's roads and railways

More than a quarter of American adults have what’s called poor health literacy. They're likely to have trouble interpreting important written health information --or have difficulties communicating well with doctors and nurses. But does that mean they're actually more likely to miss taking scheduled medications or get sick?

What will you find living in your backyard? [More]