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

For what must have felt like an interminable six months back in 2007, Sabine Begall spent her evenings at her computer, staring at photographs of grazing cattle. She would download a satellite image of a cattle range from Google Earth, tag the cows one by one, then pull up the next image.

Over a two-year period, photographer Jamey Stillings documented the transformation of an American landmark. The building of the structure that connects the Arizona and Nevada sides of a concrete arch appears in a coffee table book called The Bridge at Hoover Dam ( [More]

The 1936 film Reefer Madness developed a cult following because of its over-the-top depiction of the evils of marijuana. Getting stoned and going to a midnight showing became a ritual for many college students. [More]

If you have never watched bees carefully, you are missing out.

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

By Shinichi Saoshiro TOKYO (Reuters) - A lack of preparation and poor communication at top levels after disaster struck were among the failures that turned a nuclear accident at Japan's Fukushima plant into the worst atomic crisis in 25 years, a panel probing the disaster said on Monday. [More]

Environmentalism, like politics in general, is depressingly polarized these days. On one side, alarmists like the activist Bill McKibben , climatologist James Hansen and blogger Joe Romm warn that if we don’t cut way back on fossil fuels now! civilization may collapse.

Sci is off to the frozen north to visit people for the holidays. She’ll be back very shortly, but in the meantime, here is a repost, to make us all feel a little warmer

According to holiday lore, poor Rudolph was a victim of social exclusion because he was different from the rest of the reindeer. In a move that was lucky for nice (but not naughty) children everywhere, he was then approached by Santa, who asked him to guide the sleigh.

I am dreaming of a white Christmas. Certainly, they were rare in St.

A cringe-worthy chorus of “Happy Birthday” is usually all it takes to earn the label of “tone-deaf.” Yet fewer than 1 percent of the population is truly amusical, that is, lacking the ability to distinguish different pitches. [More]

When I’m talking I can hear my own voice. And with that feedback I can tell almost immediately when I’ve made an error. Like I just did

Four years ago Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow turned to her husband after looking up some movie trivia online and asked, “What did we do before the Internet?” Thus, Sparrow set out to investigate how Google, and all the information it proffers, has changed how people think.

Most photovoltaic solar cells have an inherent efficiency cap, limiting how much useful energy they can extract from the sun. But scientists are finding ways around this obstacle with new research that could make solar energy more efficient and more cost-effective