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

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine Climate change represents a threat not only to the existence of individual species, but also to the genetic diversity hidden within them, researchers say. [More]

By Zo

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazine The ancient Egyptians styled their hair using a fat-based "gel," an analysis of mummies has found. [More]

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Today IBM unveiled a new "cognitive computing" microchip that, according to the company, emulates some of the brain's abilities. [More]

By Jo Marchant of Nature magazine Hyenas can count up to three. [More]

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine US researchers have used computer modeling to identify an organic molecule with useful electrical properties - proof-of-concept for an approach that could soon yield new compounds to harvest solar energy in photovoltaic cells. Al

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Engineered bacteria that can detect and kill human pathogens could provide a new way to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Scientists in California are reporting raised levels of radioactive chemicals in the atmosphere in the weeks following the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. [More]

In a paper published in the latest issue of Nature Photonics, an international team of researchers takes an important step toward giving physicists the ability to effectively make movies of individual electrons. If the approach pans out, it would provide a way to gather data of unprecedented detail about how individual molecules interact during chemical reactions, with ramifications for not only the basic sciences but chemical engineering and pharmaceutical research as well.

Highly technical scientific debates are usually hashed out behind closed doors--in labs, in subscription-based journals, in the hallways at conferences attended only by a few specialized researchers. But in May the rest of us saw three real academic arguments playing out in public, largely via Twitter, blogs and wikis

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA's Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. [More]

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine On 11 March, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) warned that a 3-metre-plus tsunami would hit northeastern Japan.

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Although some of us are clearly better than others at dodging the

By George Wigmore of Nature magazine The sequencing of the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) genome has revealed an immune system never seen before in jawed vertebrates. [More]

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine Scalpel or guillotine? Those are the possible fates in store for US science funding after Congress and the White House reached a deal to cut federal spending and raise the nation's self-imposed debt limit before a 2 August deadline. The product of tumultuous negotiations, the deal largely spares science in the short term but puts a day of reckoning on the horizon: 2 January 2013.