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

[Sound clip] That's the future sound filling city streets.

There is a certain sense of unreality as I sit this morning at the Kennedy Space Center press site, with Atlantis on the launch pad just over three miles away awaiting its last mission (STS 135), NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver finishing a briefing on NASA's ambitious plans for the future, a hundred enthusiastic young people from all over the country gathered for a "Tweetup" to communicate their impressions of being at a launch--while in Washington, D.C., the House Appropriations Committee apparently is intending today to cut almost $2 billion from NASA's budget. There is a remarkable disconnect between the excitement surrounding the last shuttle launch, set to lift-off Friday, and the pervasive and merited anxiety about NASA's future that is almost the first thing out of the mouths of any of the space veterans I have encountered in the past 24 hours. I commented to a reporter earlier today that the current level of uncertainty about the future of the NASA program is the greatest that I have seen in 45 years of close observation of the U.S.

With 750 million members, the social network will no longer base success on user numbers but on the cool stuff they make using Facebook. This week Google launched its first step in revolutionizing the social network as you know it

(PhysOrg.com) -- A high-temperature superconductor can now be switched on and off within a trillionth of a second – 100 years after the discovery of superconductivity and 25 years after the first high-temperature superconductor was. A team including physicists from the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Research Group for Structural Dynamics at the University of Hamburg has realised an ultrafast superconducting switch by using intense terahertz pulses.

It’s not that America has lost its ability to innovate.

The future of medicine is contained in 'The Four Ps': Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory.

Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to launch the TouchPad tablet this week, but already CEO Leo Apotheker is thinking about what comes next. In an interview with Bloomberg Wednesday, Apotheker said the company is in talks with third parties to license WebOS, the software piloting its mobile devices. That should certainly raise red flags for Google , which has pinned the future of its mobile business on licensing its Android platform out to hardware makers such as Motorola and Samsung .

Wieden + Kennedy epic "connected emotionally," edges out Puma To the surprise of no one, Nike’s Write the Future , a cinematic tour de force from Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu won the Grand Prix in the Film category at Cannes. It may surprise some to know how close a call it was, though. There was, according to jury chair Tony Granger, global chief creative officer at Y&R, “a lot of deliberation and re-voting” among film jurors around two top contenders for the big prize--Write the Future and After Hours Athlete, a gorgeous dark horse from agency Droga5 for Puma.

Robots are quietly invading daily lives all around the world. You never know when next you'll meet a bot--just check out this week's robotics developments for proof

Controlling a boiling plasma at several million degrees Celsius – that's the challenge of nuclear fusion, our great energy hope for the future. EPFL's Plasma Physics Research Center (CRPP) has just published two scientific articles that advance the state of knowledge in the domain.

Agencies need to look beyond storytelling and take their cues from software developers, says the chief creative officer of AKQA. Recently, I tweeted : @reiinamoto: "In order for agencies to stay relevant, they must embrace the Culture of Code.” This topic came out of a conversation I was having with a friend at another agency (a traditional one, that is). The tweet got more passionate responses than any other thoughts I’ve tweeted of late

The British Library is making 250,000 texts available through Google's Books system, which is an admirable way to make historic books useful to the world again. Could this actually help shape the future of publishing? Last week the British Library was lauded for its impressive (and graphically extremely polished) effort at bringing 60,000 digital copies of historic books to the general public as a free iPad app.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Daresbury science park in Britain have offered a glimpse into what might be the future of nuclear energy production by showcasing a scaled down particle accelerator; one, that when combined with others just like it, could produce nuclear energy based on thorium, rather than uranium. Dubbed the Electron Machine with Many Applications (EMMA), the accelerator, a much smaller version of the kind used in physics research, such as the Large Hadron Collider, could be used to provide an accelerated beam necessary for the type of nuclear reaction used in a theoretical thorium plant.

Todd Lewis, Jason Sobel and Rex Hoggard recap the second round at Congressional, wondering if Rory McIlroy can get the Masters monkey off his back and establish himself as the future of golf, sharing highlights and more. (NBC Sports)

Ask a kid what they think the future will look like, and you'll get some strange answers. But if you actually listen, you might get some good ideas