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

Nature, famously, abhors a vacuum. But some cooks have learned to feel differently. Step through the swinging doors at the back of a top restaurant like Alinea in Chicago, and you may find vacuum pumps being used to reduce cooking juices into concentrated sauces, to distill essential oils from fruits and vegetables, to dehydrate chips or to brew coffee

By Kathy Finn NEW ORLEANS, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Slow-moving Tropical Storm Lee brought torrential rains to the Louisiana coast on Saturday as the heart of the storm neared New Orleans, where flood defenses were expected to be put to the test. The storm was expected to bring up to 20 inches (51 cm) of rain to southeast Louisiana over the next few days, including to New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the U.S. [More]

James Locke, a flight surgeon at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, has made dozens of people sick in the name of science. When he puts subjects in a spinning chair designed to induce motion sickness, roughly 70 percent of them succumb--and at nearly the exact same point on each ride. Locke has used this research and his work with shuttle astronauts to determine which medications and doses best prevent the nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness

At a ballgame, you have a hot dog. And at a movie you have popcorn. And you may keep working on that popcorn long after you realize that this batch really isn’t so [More]

In conjunction with Scientific American ’s special September 2011 issue on cities, we present an archival look back at the documented growth of urban environments. [More]

Mental illness can afflict children, just as cancer and other diseases do. [More]

By Kathy Finn NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Lee threatened the Louisiana coast with torrential rains and flooding on Friday and shut nearly half of U.S. offshore crude oil production and a third of its gas production.

The Obama administration has withdrawn regulations that would have prevented at least 1,500 deaths per year from unhealthy levels of smog in the air. [More]

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Surging flood waters in northern and eastern India have affected millions of people, forcing many from their homes as swollen rivers wash away roads and make rescue work difficult, government and aid officials said on Friday. [More]

Another storm has come and gone, and as the cleanup gets started another series of cities sends armies of people with clipboards out to survey, assess, reach out. [More]

CREATIVE ECCENTRICS Thank you for the excellent article “ The Unleashed Mind ,” by Shelley Carson. It’s very refreshing to read that people with eccentric, novel and even schizophrenic ways of thinking are often very high functioning, talented, intelligent individuals who can use their strange perceptual experiences to access beauty, originality and creativity.

The September 11, 2001, attacks initiated a flurry of advances in military technology over the past decade that has helped the U.S. and its allies redefine modern warfare

* Senator vows no ax to spending on "hurricane hunters" * Says deficit-cutting zeal threatens public safety [More]

"There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon," teases the poster for the new horror sci-fi flick "Apollo 18." The movie claims to reveal decades-old footage of astronauts on a secret mission two years after Apollo 17 -- the last real expedition to the moon -- flew in 1972. (Without giving away anything that isn't in the trailer, lunar aliens apparently share some blame for our 40-year absence from the moon.) In actuality, NASA did prepare for Apollos 18, 19 and 20.

* Northeast towns cut off, covered with water * Power slow to come back on, especially in Connecticut [More]