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

Meatloaf, mac-and-cheese or a big bowl of mashed potatoes. We all have our comfort foods.

May 31, 2011, was a bad day for a society already wary of all sorts of risks from modern technology, a day of celebration for those who champion more concern about those risks, and a day that teaches important lessons about the messy subjective guesswork that goes into trying to make intelligent choices about risk in the first place, for policy makers or for you and me. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says radiation from cell phones might cause cancer. OMG!!! Your phone is ringing! Now what?

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's environment agency gave its definitive approval on Wednesday for construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, a controversial $17 billion project in the Amazon that has drawn criticism from native Indians and conservationists. The regulator, Ibama, issued licenses to the consortium in charge of Belo Monte to build the massive dam on the Xingu River, a tributary to the Amazon

Since the turn of the 21st century, the number scientific papers published predominantly by Chinese researchers in any of the Nature journals has risen from six to nearly 150 according to a new index published by Nature on May 12. ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Campuses such as Tsinghua University and Peking University have become world-class institutions and the overall volume of scientific publications from China has risen from roughly 20,000 in 2000 to 130,000 in 2010, according to Thomson-Reuters.

By Nina Chestney and Jackie Cowhig LONDON (Reuters) - Germany's plan to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022 will add up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually as the country turns to fossil fuels, analysts said on Tuesday. [More]

[More]

One year after a mysterious epidemic wiped out 12,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes ( Saiga tatarica ) in Kazakhstan, the ailment has struck again there, this time killing more than 400 animals. [More]

By Kevin Krolicki TOKYO, June 1 (Reuters) - Less than a week after touring the [More]

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine An analysis of nearly three-dozen highly cited papers has found that researchers often overstate the link between biomarkers and disease by citing papers that report the strongest association, even when subsequent analyses downplay the connection. [More]

We already know that cell phones carry all sorts of germs.

Bad blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are predictors for future health problems. You won’t definitely have a heart attack, for example, but your risk is higher. Now researchers have developed a similar-style early warning system for the public health of an entire region.

The radiation emitted by mobile phones has been classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" by a World Health Organization (WHO) scientific working group. [More]

A group of physicists working with data from a particle detector at the Tevatron collider announced last month that they had found something they could not explain. High-speed smash-ups between protons and their antimatter counterparts, observed by the Illinois site's CDF detector, appeared to yield a certain kind of package in unexpected abundance : a massive particle known as the W boson along with two jets of other particles. The CDF excess hinted at the existence of some unknown particle, an unidentified and possibly disruptive addition to the family of particles described by the long-reigning, exceptionally well-tested Standard Model of particle physics

By Zeeya Merali of Nature magazine It could turn out to be a milestone for quantum computing. [More]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York State sued the U.S. government on Tuesday to demand a ban on gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin until an environmental impact study has been conducted to protect New York City's water supply. The Delaware River Basin Commission has proposed rules that would allow up to 18,000 gas wells within the basin -- which sits in Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and includes parts of New York City's watershed.