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

Ad on a London Bus. Courtesy of Annie Wade via Flickr. People have long tried tricks to aid their memories

Although most people think of memory as a vault for storing information, it is more like a seamstress who stitches together logical threads into scenes that make sense.

Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables

I sat at a piano in a sun-filled modern church. The audience--other young pianists and their parents--watched as I played the first eight notes of a piece by composer Edvard Grieg. At the ninth note, I froze

In these hyperlinked days, one might reasonably guess that the subject of the first book of photographs may have been along the lines of the True Purpose of the Internet (ask someone who’s seen “Avenue Q” if you don’t know). Or if not that, perhaps cityscapes, or naval vessels, or still lifes, or battlefields. But no

You’ve found that perfect, pricey gift for your significant other. Now, you decide to pick up a little something else. But wait! The second smaller gift can actually take away from the powerful impression of gift number 1.

Paleontologist Lee Berger displays the skull and partial skeleton of a juvenile male Australopithecus sediba. Photo by Kate Wong During a recent reporting trip to South Africa for a forthcoming feature article on a new fossil human species called A ustralopithecus sediba , I asked readers to submit their questions about this dazzling find. Inquiries about the nearly two-million-year-old hominin–which has been held up as a possible ancestor of our genus, Homo –came in via Twitter, Google Plus and the comments section of this blog.

WHY CITIES SUCCEED [More]

International diplomats met two weeks ago at the UN Durban Climate Change Conference in South Africa to discuss a greenhouse gas reduction plan displaying no urgency to reach any meaningful agreement. Meanwhile, researchers at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco are reporting what many scientists have suspected for a long time but have been thus far not been able to prove convincingly that the world s sea level is likely to rise by at least 3 feet in the next 100 years

For a long time the smallest motor in the world was 200 nanometers across. That’s really small, about one-fortieth the size of a red blood cell. Charles Sykes and his team at Tufts University have now crushed that rec

I’ve mentioned magnetic bacteria a couple of times now, so I got quite excited when Lucas Brouwers alerted me to a recent paper in Science (ref below) that explored a whole new group of magnetic bacteria.

LONDON, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell is shutting down its huge 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) Bonga oilfield off the Nigerian coast after a leak occurred while loading a tanker on Tuesday, the firm said in a statement. [More]

The mystery of why Mercury 's magnetic field is so weak may just have been solved: It is being stifled by the solar wind, researchers think. [More]

No single event is more important in broadcasting each year than the National Football League's Super Bowl.

Once adult lab mice learn to associate a particular stimulus--a sound, a flash of light--with the pain of an electric shock, they don't easily forget it, even when researchers stop the shocks. But a new study in the December 23 issue of Science shows that the antidepressant Prozac (fluoxetine) gives mice the youthful brain plasticity they need to learn that a once-threatening stimulus is now benign.