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

By Zo

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine After the Fukushima nuclear disaster spewed radiation across northern Japan in March, some feared that farming there would be shut down for years.

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine The contentious issue of drug-industry influence over medical-research writing erupted on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia this week. [More]

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine Kenya is expected to become the fourth African country to allow the commercial production of transgenic crops. The country's National Biosafety Authority is due to publish long-awaited regulations governing the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops in open fields for research and commercial purposes

The reality of climate change is serious enough that it doesn't need to be exaggerated in order to be taken seriously.

By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazine Sound, like light, can be tricky to manipulate on small scales.

Researchers in Sweden have succeeded in delivering an optical amplifier capable of amplifying light with extremely low noise. The study is published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Research published in Nature Materials this month takes lessons from cooperation in nature, including that observed in insect swarms, to create better targeting methods for cancer therapeutics [1]. "Smart" anti-cancer drug systems can use mechanisms similar to swarm intelligence to locate sites of disease in the human body.

Atlantis Launch Notes: July 7, 6:00 P.M.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine Ahead of a key international meeting on tuna catches, an assessment is painting a bleak picture of the conservation status of some of the world's most commercially valuable fish species. Bruce Collette, who studies ocean fish at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, and his colleagues conducted the first global assessment of the scrombids and billfish, groups of fish that include some of the species with the highest value as seafood, such as tuna and marlin, as well as staples such as mackerel.

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine Piracy is stopping oceanographers and meteorologists from collecting data vital to understanding the Indian monsoon and rainfall patterns in the United States, researchers say. Pirate activity off the coast of Somalia has skyrocketed in recent years. [More]

The critically endangered wild Bactrian camel ( Camelus ferus ) is so rare and lives in such remote areas that it was only recognized (after a few years of scientific debate) as its own species in 2008, decades after China started using one of its few habitats, the the Lop Nur Desert, to test nuclear bombs. Amazingly, this two-humped camel appears to be no worse for wear following the tests, but now more humans are entering those once-remote areas. With hunting, mineral mining and other threats on the rise, the camel's numbers have dropped 50 percent in the past 25 years to just 1,000 animals in two distinct populations.

By Sid Perkins of Nature magazine Evidence of historical irregularities in the motions of both the Indian and African tectonic plates bolsters the contention that plumes of hot rock rising from deep within Earth's mantle can drive the planet's tectonic plates. About 68 million years ago, the tectonic plate that includes the Indian subcontinent--which, at that time, had yet to slam into southern Asia--lay northeast of Madagascar and was moving north-eastward at a tectonically typical few centimeters per year. [More]

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine The most direct evidence yet for ancient photosynthesis has been uncovered in a fossil of a matted carpet of microbes that lived on a beach 3.3 billion years ago. Frances Westall at the Centre for Molecular Biophysics, a laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Orleans and her colleagues looked at the well-preserved Josefsdal Chert microbial mat--a thin sheet formed by layer upon layer of tiny organisms--from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. These layers of ancient microorganisms grew at a time when Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen

To avoid planetary disaster, the global community is going to have to overhaul nearly all of its operations.