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

Thanks to a new online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties — whether it’s to build a better mousetrap or a better battery — will now be able to do so far more easily than ever before.

Thanks to a new online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties — whether it’s to build a better mousetrap or a better battery — will now be able to do so far more easily than ever before.

New restrictions will make chimp research "last resort," National Institutes of Health said

The National Transportation Safety Board has called for a nationwide ban on the use of all portable electronic devices by drivers, except in an emergency. That means no more phone calls or texting from behind the wheel. It would also ban drivers from using iPods or GPS units not integrated into a car's controls

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador have found that, at just the right temperatures, nanoclusters form and improve the flow of electrical current through certain oxide materials.

Most industries, and society as a whole, are plagued with inefficiencies, middlemen, and a tainted system that gets in the way of recognizing quality work. We're up against centuries of entrenched practices that are unfriendly to merit-based opportunity. Call it depressing or unfair, but don't accept it.

SAN FRANCISCO The public at times questions scientific results produced by government agencies, thinking that the findings may be meant to support particular political policies or positions or to deflect criticism of those policies. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a formal scientific integrity policy yesterday that is intended to combat that cynicism

The old adage "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is wrong--it cripples us when it comes to optimizing what works. Google is famous for its relentless A/B testing, a technique for making constant incremental improvements by testing one small change against the previous version to see which is more successful. You can apply this model to your own work habits too.

If you're looking for a quick way to improve productivity for yourself as well as those around you, look no further than your inbox. Most of us take email for granted now, which is why there is an opportunity there to improve and optimize how you communicate

The National Physical Laboratory Acoustics team has been investigating acoustic cavitation – the formation and implosion of micro cavities, or bubbles, in a liquid caused by the extreme pressure variations of high intensity sound waves – using the new NPL reference vessel and a chemical commonly found at crime scenes.

A new network of observatories aims to take ecological science to the continental scale in the next 30 years. The National Science Foundation–sponsored network, called the National Ecological Observatory Network , or NEON, will link 20 field stations selected to provide data from 20 distinct U.S. biomes as well as 40 portable stations that can be moved from site to site

The ability to efficiently and unobtrusively screen for trace amounts of explosives on airline passengers could improve travel safety – without invoking the ire of inconvenienced fliers. Toward that end, mechanical engineer and fluid dynamicist Matthew Staymates of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and colleagues have developed a prototype air sampling system that can quickly blow particles off the surfaces of shoes and suck them away for analysis.

Goalies in the National Hockey League overwhelmingly continue to use wooden sticks largely indistinguishable from those used decades ago by their mask-less predecessors.

A House-Senate deal to fund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration includes enough cash to stabilize the nation's struggling environmental satellite program, a top agency official said yesterday. [More]

It is a tragic irony that there are over 3 million open jobs in the U.S. economy today, while over 14 million Americans remain unemployed.