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

Despite the ongoing rush of alternative-fuel tech, the gasoline engine's having a moment thanks to advances from Jaguar and the Department of Energy. Jaguar CX75 million-dollar hybrid Last year Jaguar teased an incredible concept car, the CX75, that had an electric engine in each wheel and a pair of high-performance gas turbines in its truck to provide the electrical power

%excerpt% Read more: CEO Passions: Volunteer Firefighting

A new advance in solar cells that tips the surface with minuscule cone structures could neutralize manufacturing defects, boosting efficiency up to 80 percent. In conventional solar panels, more than 50 percent of the charges generated by sunlight are lost due to defects, said Jun Xu, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The irregularities in the formation of the crystalline structure of solar cells can trap electrons and limit the transfer of sunlight to electrical energy.

Machine readable congressional transcripts will bring the power to find political gaffes to everyone. Forget leaked cables: there's enough juicy political nonsense lurking in the public record to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle until 2012

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act poured $787 billion back into our economy. That spectacular price tag became a centerpiece of the right's campaign against the left leading up to the midterm elections, and prompted the Obama administration to justify the stimulus package's effectiveness as critics tried to paint it as yet another example of wasteful government spending. That's partly why the administration has spent $1 million on road signs touting federally funded projects and $18 million on revamping Recovery.org , a site dedicated to monitoring stimulus spending

Ethonomic Indicator of the Day: 7 -- The number of IQ points that children exposed to pesticides in utero fell behind other children. From the department of "science proves the obvious": exposure to neurotoxic pesticides in the womb results in children with lower IQs, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley

Fifty years ago, in the same farewell speech in which he warned about the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex" on American politics, President Dwight Eisenhower also deplored the growing dependence of scientists on federal funding. "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded." Eisenhower's speech comes to mind as I gravely regard the latest example of the militarization of science, a $125 million collaboration between psychologists and the U.S. Army called "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness," or CSF

Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems?

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?

An employee comes to you claiming fear that a co-worker might cast a spell on her. What do you do

State agencies will get more federal funding to provide fresh fruits and vegetables at schools, the Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday.

The first ever study of its kind by See Change Strategy takes a deep dive into medical pot, a growth industry. Here's a free sample of the data.

A big breakthrough in the race for better biofuels was announced this week from the U.S. Department of Energy, where the department's BioEnergy Science Center figured out how to produce isobutanol, a gasoline-like fuel, directly from cellulose (i.e. corn stalks and switchgrass).

Wind farms suffer from a problem: They're built to harness wind, but are still vulnerable to wear-and-tear caused by severely windy conditions. Enter the Record Hill Wind project, a Yale University Endowment-funded 50.6 megawatt wind power plant set to start construction this year in rural Maine