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

Iceland is known as the "land of ice and fire," but new findings suggest that the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean could easily take over that title. In addition to the seven volcanic islands that make up this Antarctic archipelago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) recently discovered that 12 volcanoes lurk below the water's surface. [More]

Bill Borucki is the principal investigator for NASA's planet-finding Kepler spacecraft. At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Borucki explained how long it will be before Kepler can tell us whether habitable, Earth-like planets are common or rare: [More]

Poor countries have spent just as much as rich ones -- and in the case of China, more -- to develop low-carbon energy, according to a study coming out this week. Its conclusions could turn the conventional wisdom about the differences among nations over mitigation efforts on its head. The report by former World Bank economist David Wheeler, who now leads the climate change division at the think tank Center for Global Development, finds that China spent 94 cents of every $10,000 of average income on clean energy between 1990 and 2008.

(especially if you are like a mouse, which you are)

The Open Laboratory is the annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs.

After people realize the facts have been fudged, they do their best to set the record straight: judges tell juries to forget misleading testimony; newspapers publish errata. But even explicit warnings to ignore misinformation cannot erase the damage done, according to a new study from the University of Western Australia

The brain is an exceedingly complex machine that harbors about 100 trillion neural connections . So it comes as no surprise that neuroscientists make great efforts to reduce or represent that complexity in their research with innovative imaging techniques.

Is it really as simple at that? I got a tweet from a reader yesterday pointing me to an article in the LA Times. [More]

Research universities have been abuzz with what some are calling the “next big thing”: convergence, the integration of the life, engineering and physical sciences.

By James B. [More]

What do you do while driving to make the streets more dangerous?

Look at yourself in your bathroom mirror. [More]

Humans have played a role in large animal extinctions since time immemorial. The giant ground sloth of Texas

An unmanned NASA probe made history 117 million miles from Earth on Saturday (July 16) when it arrived at the huge asteroid Vesta, making it the first spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the solar system's asteroid belt. The Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta after a four-year chase and will spend about a year studying the huge space rock before moving on to visit another asteroid called Ceres

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as evidence of evolution; doomsayers see signs of the end of the world, and the rest of us see just another day