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

Magician David Copperfield waved his hand over the envelope, which popped open. He wiggled his fingers, and the card slid upward

Last week, the Foundation Questions Institute announced the winners of its third essay contest , which Scientific American co-sponsored. (I helped to decide on the question, judge the essays and hand out the awards at the World Science Festival in New York City.) The essay question was, "Is Reality Digital or Analog?" Is nature, at root, continuous or discretized

The most surprising part of this story was that they managed to record brainwave activity from the sharks. This tale is about one of the most fascinating figures in the history of neuroscience: Dr.

A newborn’s immune system needs time to figure out what should be fought and what should be left alone. Conventional wisdom had it that early exposure to potential troublemakers, from peanuts to pets, could lead to allergy issues later. But recent research shows that having a dog or cat at home isn't likely to make children allergic to animals

By Daniel Cressy of Nature magazine Many people affected by mental illness are facing a bleak future as drug companies abandon research into the area and other funding providers fail to take up the slack, according to a new report.

LONDON -- One of the driest spring seasons on record in northern Europe has sucked soils dry and sharply reduced river levels to the point that governments are starting to fear crop losses and France, in particular, is bracing for blackouts as its river-cooled nuclear power plants may be forced to shut down. [More]

* Airlines ground flights to Argentine, Uruguay airports * Chilean volcano has been erupting since June 4 [More]

[More]

The Financial Times follows Inc.'s Argentina story with its own take on the country, focusing on the difficulty businesses have raising money : With a small stock market where institutional investors have been in short supply since the nationalisation of pension funds in 2008, and few angel investors or venture capital funds, the traditional source of seed capital is what is known as FFF: friends, family and fools. “There is no culture of investment. People stick their money under the mattress, they don’t put it to work,” says Leo Piccioli, who used to work at Officenet, a stationery and supplies start-up bought in 2004 by Staples, the US office supply chain store, and is now that company’s Argentina country manager

Eshel Ben-Jacob is interested not only in the genomes of the bacteria he studies but also in their personalities. He compares many to Hollywood celebrities. “On the one hand, we admire them, but on the other hand, we think that they are stupid,” says Ben-Jacob, a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Electricity controls much of the human body: consider the electrical firing of neurons and the current transmitted by the heart. Yet historically the electrodes that have been used in medicine to monitor and regulate essential activity have been biologically incompatible because they are stiff, big and water-sensitive. Now scientists are setting new standards with their designs for flexible, stretchable and waterproof circuits and electrodes that mimic the properties of human tissues

History is littered with private indiscretions made public--some have just been more public than others:

There is some speculation among some politicians and pundits that the fog of war will soon extend to the Internet, if it has not already, given a recent report that the U.S. Defense Department will introduce its first cyber warfare doctrine this month, combined with similar announcements from the governments of Australia, China and the U.K.

It came from outer space. It being the stuff of life--amino acids, sugars and other organic molecules. [More]

Sprawl isn't just eating up the countryside--it's also blocking the breezes that would otherwise clear out air pollution. That's according to a new study of Houston from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research