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

Conservatives' trust of science has gradually decreased over the past 40 years, beginning perhaps when empirical research was increasingly used to justify government regulations, according to a new academic analysis. [More]

Consider an hour without power, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, local time. Organizers say as many as 1.8 billion will join in the symbolic environmental event worldwide.

A new " bioreactor " could store electricity as liquid fuel with the help of a genetically engineered microbe and copious carbon dioxide. The idea--dubbed " electrofuels " by a federal agency funding the research--could offer electricity storage that would have the energy density of fuels such as gasoline.

[More]

Recently an old colleague, Dr Andrew Rogoyski, came to lecture to our MSc students on how government deals with cyber security. Dr Rogoyski has studied the interactions between government and industry and his talk led to a key question for which there was a surprising range of views

Trepinated skull of Phineas Gage Our current understanding of how the brain works often borrows from observations of the anomalous patient.

Kindles, Nooks and other E-readers catch flack for threatening the future of printed books. But reading itself may get a boost from the devices

Air-powered cars have been on the cusp of reality for more than a century. Sure, compressed air is a clean fuel, but it's not efficient enough to power a car engine that will take you very far or very fast. [More]

Tiny robots that swim through our blood vessels attacking viruses and malignant cells have not quite crossed the line that separates science fiction from science--but there might be a way to jump-start their development.

A typical sunflower with a dark center and a mane of large yellow 'petals' (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) The word “sunflower” brings to mind a mane of vibrant yellow petals encircling a dark whorl of seeds.

Climate change is bringing more droughts, heat waves and powerful rainstorms, shifts that will require governments to change how they cope with natural disasters to protect human lives and the world economy, a new U.N. report says.

Even as Iran s nuclear program raises the likelihood of yet another conflict in the Middle East, the bigger threat is a potential food crisis in the making, says Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute. When I ask myself, what are the threats for out security today, foreign aggression doesn t make top five, Brown told attendees of the Affordable World Security Conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Grain: some countries are hitting a ceiling on agricultural productivity [More]

Key concepts [More]

A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought.

Mitochondrial network of an endothelial cell is shown in green Research projects evolve in a fortuitous manner, often guided by a convergence of novel observations, intuition, helpful colleagues and unique personal circumstances. It is precisely this constellation that prompted two cardiologists to study the mitochondrial networks in lung cancer cells.