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

The nuclear crisis in Japan provides an impetus for Congress to confront a failed national policy on dealing with spent fuel from U.S. reactors, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee yesterday.

Mythology, science fiction, and comic books are chock full of stories of heroes and their battles against the ills of society, the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Your favorite coffee shop is crowded with harried people, and you are standing shoulder to shoulder in a slow-moving line. Each jostling shift of the crowd aggravates your severe social anxiety. You start gasping for air; your heart quickens and you want to run

In 2011, the world will emit more than 35 Billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every day of the year, almost a hundred million tons will be released into the atmosphere.

It’s been nearly 20 years since astronomers first identified a planet outside our solar system. More than 500 exoplanets have been discovered since then, yet it’s not clear if even one of them might be habitable

Photographs by Darren Soh An elderly women holds a sign that says "Please, sir hold on. I'm not asking for a red envelope." | Photographs by Darren Soh It is a couple of weeks before Chinese New Year and Chen Guangbiao is sitting in the back of his SUV, barking orders out the window at his press secretary, a serious lady with a serious clipboard: "Beijing News, Beijing Evening News, Beijing Youth Daily ..."Chen, a member of China's new and fast-growing billionaire ranks, has just paid these newspapers to publish articles listing the charitable deeds he's done over the course of the year.

Some 3.2 million Americans have chronic hepatitis C , an infection that can linger in the body for years before producing symptoms. It can eventually lead to serious liver scarring and cancer. And most infections in the U.S

Graphic artist Isao Hashimoto depicts the startling number of nuclear bombs that have gone off between 1945 and 1998, from the early U.S. [More]

Welcome to a new regular feature called "Too Hard for Science?" The idea here is to interview scientists about pet ideas they would love to explore that seem impossible to investigate in real life. Perhaps they involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun; perhaps they would be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people; perhaps they would be too expensive, or require centuries to run, or could never find volunteers to participate, or are in some way unprovable. [More]

By Richard A. [More]

This Friday, April 1, begins a month-long participatory blogging project at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., called Experimonth: Mood . The culmination of many ideas and personal experiments by museum staff members, their families and friends, Experimonth has morphed from a personal project centered around New Year's Resolutions into an effort to pair local researchers with our community in meaningful ways

Dear EarthTalk : I understand a recent government report concluded that our global food system is in deep trouble, that roughly two billion people are hungry or undernourished while another billion are overconsuming to the point of obesity. What’s going on?

AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center meteorologists, led by Meteorologist and Hurricane Forecaster Paul Pastelok, are predicting an active season for 2011 with more impact on the U.S. coastline than last year. The team is forecasting a total of 15 named tropical storms, eight of which will attain hurricane status and three of which will attain major hurricane status (Category 3 or higher).

If you type "Japanese barberry" into a search engine, the first result will likely be a National Park Service web page designed to look like a "Wanted" poster. "LEAST WANTED" is written across the top. It’s a fact sheet about the ecological threat posed by this invasive shrub.