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

Before satellite images and drones could pinpoint the exact location of enemy targets, warfare was often more like a game of Battleship: a complex series of guesses based on spotty information. [More]

Albert Einstein once commented that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” This may have been an accurate reflection of physics in his time, but it is no longer the case--for physics or any other field. Benjamin Jones, an expert in innovation at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes awarded in physics, chemistry and medicine between 1900 and 2008. With a few exceptions--notably quantum mechanics discoveries of the 1920s and 1930s--the trend across all fields is toward researchers being older when they produce their greatest work.

Is there a difference between the brain of an atheist andthe brain of a religious person? [More]

On a daytime flight pick a window seat that will allow you to locate the shadow of the airplane on the clouds; this requires figuring out the direction of travel relative to the position of the sun. If you are lucky, you may be rewarded with one of the most beautiful of all meteorological sights: a multicolored-light halo surrounding the shadow. Its iridescent rings are not those of a rainbow but of a different and more subtle effect called a glory

A DNA molecule that is methylated on both strands on the center cytosine. Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

By Sui-Lee Wee XIAOXIN, China (Reuters) - Nothing in Wu Wenyong's rural childhood hinted he would end up on a hospital bed aged 15, battling two kinds of cancer. [More]

As you know from my last post , I am staunch proponent of open access to scientific information, especially the variety that I paid for by virtue of taxation . The Research Works Act ( HR3699 ) being proposed now will lock away taxpayer funded research from the hands of those whose hard-earned wages funded the research. It’s really a no-brainer and the NIH compromise was generous, allowing publishers to make a profit from research works for a whole year, during the crucial access time for new articles

The smell of a body is the (bacteria themselves) which we breathe in with our nose and mouth, which we suddenly possess as though (they) were (the body s) most secret substance and, to put the matter in a nutshell, its nature.

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What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these tech

Fritz Haber I’m haunted by one of the stories in the latest episode of Radiolab , can’t get it out of my head. Like everyone else, I love Radiolab and often sprinkle stories I learned from the show into cocktail party conversation (do I go to nerdy cocktail parties or do I make cocktail parties nerdy?), but the Bad Show was especially gripping, in particular the story of Fritz Haber . Haber was a German chemist working in the early 20th century, but his name is well known in Chemical Engineering departments (he is, after all, one of The Most Popular Chemical Engineers Ever .) I’ve even looked him up in wikipedia recently, focusing on the details of the chemical process he invented and never scrolling down to learn more about his life

Actor, playwright and journalist Anna Deavere Smith talks about the health care crisis and her play about people dealing with illness, health and the health care system, Let Me Down Easy . The performance can be streamed on the PBS website, PBS.org , as part of the Great Performances series. [More]

Across the animal kingdom, males are competitive when females are scarce. Now a study with people has examined how the number of women affects men’s attitudes about a marker for competitive fitness: Money. Basically, the fewer the women, the more the men threw their money around.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will construct an offshore wind farm with an installed capacity of 300 megawatts in its northern Hebei province, the largest such project undertaken by the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The wind farm, built with a total investment of 5.76 billion yuan ($913 million) will comprise of 100 units of 3 megawatts offshore turbines. It will be located near Puti Island in Bohai Sea.