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

* Ash cloud has disrupted flights for days * Chilean, Brazilian airlines cancel flights [More]

A massive burst of solar wind that erupted from the sun Tuesday is expected to deliver only a "glancing blow" to the Earth's vulnerable magnetic field, NASA officials said yesterday. But it will preview what some experts call a potentially existential threat to the power grids of the United States and other nations, and the populations that depend on them.

Help scientists study pollination by planting flowers and tracking bee traffic [More]

Ever since IBM supercomputer Watson beat Jeopardy! champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, there’s been a lot of talk about putting the computer’s question-and-answer capabilities to real applications. In addition to consuming massive amounts of information, the supercomputer has been trained to understand literary references, interpret linguistic nuance, generate hypotheses, perform analysis, and score its own answers for likelihood of accuracy. All of these abilities enable Watson to make reasoned judgments, a skill hitherto attributed exclusively to human beings

Rodrigo Hamede, of the University of Tasmania, studies Tasmanian devils in the wild. He shot videos of some of the endangered carnivorous marsupials after he and his colleagues conducted a study of how much contact devils had with one another in Narawntapu National Park, on Tasmania's northern coast. [More]

TAIPEI (Reuters) - A boat built completely from plastic bottles and other recycled materials, including old advertising banners, set sail in Taiwan to raise awareness about the marine environment. The trimaran, named the "Polli-Boat," had as its main flotation system a series of interlocking plastic bricks made from plastic bottles with strengthened polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most common plastic in use today

Everything has a downside--even optimism. [More]

While you’re humming along to the Talking Heads, I’d like to consider another group who can listen to the Talking Heads without really hearing them. [More]

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The underpinnings of autism are turning out to be even more varied than the disease's diverse manifestations. In four new studies and an analysis published June 8 researchers have added some major landmarks in the complex landscape of the disease, uncovering clues as to why the disease is so much more prevalent in male children and how such varied genetic mutations can lead to similar symptoms.

From the outlook of a planet that resides next to a quiet, relatively predictable star, the circumstances that lead to dramatic stellar explosions elsewhere in the universe can sound somewhat improbable. Some such blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, occur when a small, dense star known as a white dwarf--roughly the diameter of Earth, but hundreds of thousands of times more massive--grows too large by siphoning material off a neighboring star, igniting a thermonuclear explosion.

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Time might heal metaphorical heartbreak, but an injured heart can rarely repair itself. [More]

* No injuries reported so far * Fire 'very large, very intense' [More]

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. And you shouldn’t judge a species by its place of origin

In the last five years or so, weather changes have taken a toll on Michigan's roads. Heavy rains have overpowered drains, causing water to spill onto the road and wash whole sections away