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

The nose has long been viewed as a disorganized sensory organ, its odor receptors strewn about with very little rhyme or reason. A study in Nature Neuroscience , published online September 25, challenges that notion. It suggests that odor receptors are grouped by the pleasantness of the odors they detect

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine Texas higher-education officials delivered a stern message to physicists yesterday that the state is likely to stick to plans to phase out 'low-performing' physics programs within the next year or two if they cannot demonstrate compelling plans to improve.

It didn’t take long for the recent Foundation Questions Institute conference on the nature of time to delve into the purpose of life.

By Amy Maxmen of Nature magazine Ecologists have spent decades trapping and tagging species in the name of understanding biodiversity, but a far easier way may lie just beneath their feet. [More]

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine A 90-year-old tuft of hair has yielded the first complete genome of an Aboriginal Australian, a young man who lived in southwest Australia. [More]

By usan Moran of Nature magazine Nitrate levels in the waters off China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula are soaring, according to a 30-year study published in Science today. [More]

Boosting up microprocessors -the heart of modern computers- at the speed of light, reducing consumptions and costs, may now be a reality thanks to the development of a new high-performance chip, the results of which have been published in Nature Photonics.

Physicists at the RUB, working in collaboration with researchers from Grenoble and Tokyo, have succeeded in taking a decisive step towards the development of more powerful computers. They were able to define two little quantum dots (QDs), occupied with electrons, in a semiconductor and to select a single electron from one of them using a sound wave, and then to transport it to the neighbouring QD. A single electron "surfs" thus from one quantum dot to the next like a fish on a wave.

The founder of the Slow Money movement makes the case for the kinds of return on investment you get when you put money into your local community. Is there such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, investments that are too abstract and securities that are too complex

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine A widely touted--but controversial--molecular fountain of youth has come under fire yet again, with the publication of new data challenging the link between proteins called sirtuins and longer lifespan. In a paper published today in Nature , researchers report that overexpressing a sirtuin gene in two model organisms--the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster --does not boost longevity as had been previously reported. [More]

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine Shortly after 2 p.m. [More]

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine There's a showdown brewing in the state of Texas -- and it could get ugly. [More]

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine There's a showdown brewing in the state of Texas -- and it could get ugly.

By Lucas Laursen of Nature magazine Glaciologists and climatologists are racing to correct an error in the latest edition of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which they say overstates the extent of ice loss in Greenland over the past 12 years. The 13th edition of the atlas was released on 15 September. [More]

Although astronomers only slowly came to realize dark matter’s importance in the universe, for me personally it happened in an instant. In my first project as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, I measured the rotational velocities of star-forming giant molecular clouds in the outer part of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy.