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

When faced with trying to accomplish a big goal, one of the most daunting questions is: Where do I start?

Desert soil has a living crust that is essential for fixing nitrogen, a critical plant nutrient, and for avoiding erosion that produces a swirl of itinerant dust.

One fine afternoon last may, Jayne Belnap drove north out of Moab, Utah, in her beige Lexus SUV when the highway vanished.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Air pollution levels in Hong Kong were the worst ever last year, the South China Morning Post reported on Monday, a finding that may further undermine the city's role as an Asian financial centre as business executives relocate because of health concerns. Worsening air quality in Hong Kong caused by vehicle emissions and industrial pollution from the neighboring Pearl River Delta is already forcing many in the financial community to move to Singapore

In July 2010, the editorial department of Scientific American where at the time I was on staff received a review copy of a book was slated to come out in September. It was a slim, drab-looking, paperback-bound volume, still without a cover design or page numbers

When people over 65 show losses in their short-term memory and comprehension, it’s no surprise. But a new study claims that a general cognitive decline starts to set in as early as age 45. The research is in the British Medical Journal .

More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli--including, most recently, our immune system. [More]

By Marice Richter FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - It's official: 2011 was the driest year on record in Texas, according to the National Weather Service.

The short of it ( covered in depth by Michael Eisen , and Razib tipped me off to the issue ) is that Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money. Currently, any research funded by the National Institute of Health must be made freely available to the public 12 months after publication. You can see why for-profit publishing companies do not like this policy.

Stephen Hawking turns 70 on Sunday, beating the odds of a daunting diagnosis by nearly half a century.

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important open problem in the mathematics of Sudoku , the game popularized in Japan that involves filling in a 9x9 grid of squares with the numbers 1-9 according to certain rules. Gary McGuire of University College Dublin shows in a proof posted online on January 1 that the minimum number of clues--or starting digits--needed to complete a puzzle is 17; puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not have a unique solution. [More]

Illuminate a piece of metal, such as copper or silver, and the electrons get excited .

Bats have an image problem.

Attending the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is like walking along a loud, crowded boardwalk on a hot summer day. There may not be much sun or sand, but amongst the thousands of tech peddlers who flock there each January, you’ll find no shortage of hype, hoopla and expensive gimmicks

Sea [More]