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

In the previous blog entry my colleague Jim Haw gave the rationale for our work on Guam. After a week on Guam we will make the two-hour flight to Palau. The highest level of species biodiversity occurs in the Indo-West Pacific region, with nearly 2 percent of the world’s reefs distributed throughout Micronesia

A short discussion with the man behind Hotspot Shield about web anonymizers, the Arab Spring, and why expats in Dubai aren't happy with firewalls. Fast Company recently had the opportunity to speak with David Gorodyansky, CEO of AnchorFree , on the use of his company's popular Hotspot Shield software during the Arab Spring. Although Hotspot Shield is best known as a product used to access services such as Hulu and the BBC iPlayer across national borders, it also played a crucial role in organizing uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Between cds, mp3s, live streams, satellite radio, and even conventional am/fm radio, it’s hard to imagine being without near-instantaneous access to music. While it may seem like only recently that we’ve been able to listen to music via our phones, it turns out people were doing just that over 100 years ago

For rational people, dismissing the silliness around the supposed end of the world on May 21 is all too easy. In case you haven't heard, Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping has done some questionable math based on Biblical writing to determine that the faithful will be "raptured" tomorrow and that nonbelievers will be left behind to fester to death over the next few months

To press the "accelerator" on a Tesla Roadster 2.5 is to get an intimation of life as a race car driver. In perhaps the signature display of an electric car's appeal to gearheads, the Roadster instantly applies more than 300 amps of electric current to deliver 288 horsepower worth of acceleration--it's called instant torque, 273 pound-feet of it to be specific, and it's something that fossil fuel engines cannot provide due to the demands of combustion. That allows even an unprofessional driver to go from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in seconds

When a prominent critic slams your restaurant, how do you recover? Last August, New York Times restaurant reviewer Sam Sifton wrote that the food at Plein Sud in Tribeca was "lacking in flavor, texture, temperature or interest: room-service fare that leads to increased loneliness, raiding of the minibar, sleepless hours staring at the television in blue light, thinking about home." Ouch. For an establishment that had opened a few months before the review was published, it was an ominous sign.

Ever wonder what it’s like to live in a cramped space with 14 strangers for a week? Well, I can tell you.

My hometown lies on a sandbar, squarely in the floodplain of the Upper Mississippi River. Winona (Minnesota) benefited from its position along the river, rapidly growing to wealth as a steamboat port and lumber town. The second railroad bridge across the Mississippi was built there, and in 1900, Winona had more millionaires per capita than any other town in the country.

Photograph by Jason Madara Surf's up! A Maine studio returns to surfboard building's roots with a wooden, sustainable board. "Surfers are so connected to nature, but they're divorced from the impact foam boards have on the environment," says Brad Anderson, cofounder of Grain Surfboards

Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lecture Series University of Washington [More]

On Saturday morning we fly to Guam, an island about one fifth the size of Rhode Island. Guam is part of the United States, although as a territory it lacks voting representation in Congress or a say in presidential elections. Location is primary in real estate speculation, but it is also central to military strategy and ecosystem management

SUBSIDIES AND HORMONES In “ How to Fix the Obesity Crisis ,” David H. Freedman proposed behavior modification as a solution, but it cannot be applied to 200 million overweight people. Freedman also seems to support subsidies for fruits and vegetables and other government-sponsored programs.

A week's warning could save an untold number of lives In ""Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

For most of the past century the scientific consensus held that the adult human brain did not produce any new neurons. Researchers overturned that theory in the 1990s, but what role new neurons played in the adult human brain remained a mystery. Recent work now sug

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