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

A group of nuclear power experts and former regulators from 11 nations, responding to Japan's nuclear disaster, is calling for "stress tests" on the world's reactors to determine their ability to withstand extreme earthquakes, flooding or other natural disasters that strike singly or in combination.

A Japanese miner climbs onto the stage, his helmet light bobbing and a pickax slung over his shoulder.

With a few supplies and some careful cutting and pasting, you can build the gravity-defying structure that won the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest . Created by Japanese mathematical engineer Kokichi Sugihara, the magnetlike slopes illusion is cleverly designed to make marbles roll "uphill." It's a trick of perspective: The slopes actually tilt downward, but they are supported by leaning columns that look straight when viewed from a specific vantage point. Sugihara discovered the illusion accidentally while feeding 3-D line drawings of "impossible" objects into a computer program designed to interpret them as solid structures

BRAZZAVILLE (Reuters) - The Republic of Congo has banned the production, import, sale and use of plastic bags in a move to fight environmental pollution in the Central African nation, government spokesman Bienvenu Okiemy said Thursday. Okiemy said the government adopted a decree following a cabinet meeting Wednesday

Accelerated Expectations: All Eyes on Large Hadron Collider in Dark Matter Hunt

Since arriving in the Republic of Palau, we have spent a lot of time reflecting on our experiences on Guam (in which the environmental situation is dire).

The "food pyramid" is getting squashed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) this week. [More]

By Zach Howard CONWAY, Mass., June 1 (Reuters) - At least four people were [More]

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Fossilized teeth of early human ancestors bear signs that females left their families when they came of age, whereas males stayed close to home. A chemical analysis of australopithecine fossils ranging between roughly 1.8 million and 2.2 million years old from two South African caves finds that teeth thought to belong to females are more likely to have incorporated minerals from a distant region during formation than those from males

Deep in South Africa's gold mines water can be found in rock fractures, hosting bacteria that off the stone itself and form biofilms on the hard surfaces. Now new samples pulled from these sunless pools show that nematodes--roundworms of varying size that are essentially tubes with a digestive tract and thrive everywhere on the planet--likely graze on these bacterial films, surviving more than a kilometer underground.

Editor's note (6/1/2011): We are making the text of this July 1985 article freely available for 30 days to coincide with the publication of a paper on entropy and quantum systems by Vlatko Vedral. He authored our June 2011 cover story and blogs about his latest work , which discusses the research featured in this 1985 article. A computation, whether it is performed by electronic machinery, on an abacus or in a biological system such as the brain, is a physical process

People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome were dealt another blow this week when it became clear that researchers still fail to understand the genesis of this disease. Perhaps most importantly, these patients are being advised to stop taking antiretroviral medications.

May 31, 2011, was a bad day for a society already wary of all sorts of risks from modern technology, a day of celebration for those who champion more concern about those risks, and a day that teaches important lessons about the messy subjective guesswork that goes into trying to make intelligent choices about risk in the first place, for policy makers or for you and me. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says radiation from cell phones might cause cancer. OMG!!! Your phone is ringing! Now what?

By Nina Chestney and Jackie Cowhig LONDON (Reuters) - Germany's plan to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022 will add up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually as the country turns to fossil fuels, analysts said on Tuesday. [More]

This morning, the world witnessed the safe landing of the space shuttle Endeavour, after a 16-day mission to the International Space Station. For those of us inhabiting Earth’s more western time zones, we got to watch the landing last night, with no inconvenience, other than having to divert from the Colbert Report. While I did not travel to the Kennedy Space Center for the landing and recovery of the Planetary Society’s experiment known as Shuttle LIFE, my experience was infinitely better than it was the last time that I had an experiment on a shuttle, when I did go to the Cape to attend the landing.