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

[Audio clip from The Graduate: One word, plastics.]

The black-and-blue rule of baseball--if your pitcher beans our batter, our pitcher will bean yours--it turns out, is highly dependent on the weather. [More]

As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments.

Dear EarthTalk : What will be the effect of all the flooding along the Mississippi River for organic farmers, given all the pollutants in the water? When they recover, can they still certify their products as organic? --Michael O’Loughlin, Tigard, Ore.

Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible.

A new form of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been found in dairy cows and humans in the U.K.

The quadratic equation may have instilled horror in many of us. But for some five to seven percent of the population even basic math--like the concept of the numbers five and seven--causes anxiety. You may never have heard of the disorder called dyscalculia, yet it’s as common as dyslexia, according to research in the journal Science .

There’s a habit that’s had scientists puzzled: the practice of geophagy--eating dirt.

Editor's Note: The following blog post first appeared May 17 on the World Science Festival's web site.

We spend a third of our lives asleep.

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space. [More]

Sunday, June 05 .p { float:left; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, serif; height:225px; margin-right:25px; margin-top:10px; width:178px; } #wrapper p { line-height:15px !important; font-size:14px !important; } #wrapper { position:; } The reputation of skyscrapers -- all that water use! CO2 emissions! -- is pretty dim. But these towering beauties prove that green doesn't have to mean unsightly

Wednesday, June 15 Though they may be loath to admit it, most attendees at this New York conference are sure to be pondering the same question: How do I get more followers on Twitter? We turned to social-media scientist Dan Zarrella, who has analyzed millions of tweets (and earned 33,000 followers of his own), to get some answers.

In X-Men: First Class , the latest film about the popular comic book superheroes, one of the mutant characters goes by the nickname Darwin because he has the power of “reactive evolution.” He instantly adapts to any threat: toss him in water and he sprouts gills; hit him with a club and his skin turns to armored plates. Biology mavens in the audience may object that this form of evolution is more or less the opposite of what Charles Darwin proposed with his theory of natural selection

Dear EarthTalk : Can you explain the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act?