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

How much light the sun emits affects the Earth's weather and climate.

For most of human history, we have defined time through the movements of planets and stars.

Dear EarthTalk : I heard that some reusable bags contain lead. Is this a major health concern?

Use Google Goggles to scan bands and art (not clunky codes) to download free stuff in the new HTC Sensation 4G ads, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Deutsch L.A. and Google

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Seventeen and a half billion kilometers from Earth, mankind's most distant probe seems to be on the edge of interstellar space. The Voyager 1 spacecraft is at the limit of the 'heliosheath', where particles streaming from the Sun clash with the gases of the galaxy. [More]

By shooting a beam of neutrinos through a small slice of the Earth under Japan, physicists say they've caught the particles changing their stripes in new ways. These observations may one day help explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter.

(PhysOrg.com) -- It is not the same as it used to be, the element finding business. We have discovered and named all the elements from hydrogen (element 1) up to element 112 (copernicium)[1], and last week IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry - it does to elements what the International Astronomical Union did to Pluto), the world governing body for chemistry, has announced the confirmation of a couple more.

Fifty-six million years ago, enough carbon leaked into the atmosphere to alter the climate and acidify the ocean. The same thing is happening now, much faster.

Dear EarthTalk : I thought “farm raised” was the way to go when buying fish, to avoid mercury contamination. But are there other concerns about farm-raised that make some fish a poor choice for good health? What are the safest fish to buy and which should be avoided

The surface of Earth is being reshaped constantly. Mountainous uplands are broken down by water and wind producing sediment that is moved by rivers to lowlands. Some of this sediment is deposited along the way, some is delivered to the coast and continental shelf, and some makes its way to the ultimate sink, the deep sea

Last Saturday, at a workshop organized by the Foundation Questions Institute , Nobel laureate physicist Gerard 't Hooft gave a few informal remarks on the deep nature of reality.

A massive burst of solar wind that erupted from the sun Tuesday is expected to deliver only a "glancing blow" to the Earth's vulnerable magnetic field, NASA officials said yesterday. But it will preview what some experts call a potentially existential threat to the power grids of the United States and other nations, and the populations that depend on them.

Every year on June 8, ocean enthusiasts celebrate World Oceans Day . Last year over 300 official events in 45 countries recognized how the Earth’s largest and most complex ecosystem affects not only the rest of the planet and its inhabitants, but how the seas touch upon the essence of being human and the connectivity of the human-sphere to the ocean-sphere.

From the outlook of a planet that resides next to a quiet, relatively predictable star, the circumstances that lead to dramatic stellar explosions elsewhere in the universe can sound somewhat improbable. Some such blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, occur when a small, dense star known as a white dwarf--roughly the diameter of Earth, but hundreds of thousands of times more massive--grows too large by siphoning material off a neighboring star, igniting a thermonuclear explosion.

Clean power from the Earth used to use a lot of water. But a new discovery means that water can be replaced with CO2, which gets left in the ground and doesn't alter the climate