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

Over a two-year period, photographer Jamey Stillings documented the transformation of an American landmark. The building of the structure that connects the Arizona and Nevada sides of a concrete arch appears in a coffee table book called The Bridge at Hoover Dam ( [More]

The 1936 film Reefer Madness developed a cult following because of its over-the-top depiction of the evils of marijuana. Getting stoned and going to a midnight showing became a ritual for many college students. [More]

If you have never watched bees carefully, you are missing out.

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop

An x-ray image of the region around Sgr A*. Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff et al.

When it comes to science, temperature matters. And when it comes to Wisconsin, things get really, really cold.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

By Shinichi Saoshiro TOKYO (Reuters) - A lack of preparation and poor communication at top levels after disaster struck were among the failures that turned a nuclear accident at Japan's Fukushima plant into the worst atomic crisis in 25 years, a panel probing the disaster said on Monday. [More]

Sci is off to the frozen north to visit people for the holidays. She’ll be back very shortly, but in the meantime, here is a repost, to make us all feel a little warmer

I am dreaming of a white Christmas. Certainly, they were rare in St.

A cringe-worthy chorus of “Happy Birthday” is usually all it takes to earn the label of “tone-deaf.” Yet fewer than 1 percent of the population is truly amusical, that is, lacking the ability to distinguish different pitches. [More]

When I’m talking I can hear my own voice. And with that feedback I can tell almost immediately when I’ve made an error. Like I just did

Most photovoltaic solar cells have an inherent efficiency cap, limiting how much useful energy they can extract from the sun. But scientists are finding ways around this obstacle with new research that could make solar energy more efficient and more cost-effective

Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables

I sat at a piano in a sun-filled modern church. The audience--other young pianists and their parents--watched as I played the first eight notes of a piece by composer Edvard Grieg. At the ninth note, I froze