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

They say all roads lead to Rome. Unfortunately that ain’t all that roads lead to. A new study shows that roads can promote the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The idea of drugs tunneling their way through the brain, worms to the mind’s apple, is a frequent metaphor I hear. I wrote on the topic for Discovery’s Curiosity and resurfaced it to prepare material for drug education talks with high schoolers.

An industrial add-on to geothermal power plants near the Salton Sea in California could one day produce the lithium that is required for electric car batteries . Already, Simbol Materials , the company behind the process, has begun purifying lithium from conventional mining operations in Argentina, Chile and elsewhere for the global battery market at a demonstration facility in Brawley, Calif.

Recent exploration of rare volcanic rocks in the rugged, dangerous desert of southern Afghanistan has identified world-class concentrations of rare earth elements, the prized group of raw materials that are essential in the manufacture of many modern technologies, from electric cars to solar panels. So far, geologists say, they have mapped one million metric tons of these critical elements, which include lanthanum, cerium and neodymium

The top U.S. particle collider, now eclipsed by a more powerful European machine, will be switched off September 30 [More]

Image courtesy of Flickr/Ted Abbott In 2009 California took in $839 million in taxes from the sale of cigarettes. And with its--and many other states’--budget in dire straights, it is hard to turn down any extra income. [More]

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - EU lawmakers recommended on Thursday including a call for global targets on renewable energy and energy efficiency in the European Union's negotiating position for next year's Rio+20 sustainability summit in June. "We should aim at globally binding targets," said Karl-Heinz Florenz, a member of the European Parliament who helped draft the resolution. [More]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Europe's first exchange for trading wood pellets, used to replace coal in electricity generation, will be launched on November 3 in the port of Rotterdam, Anglo-Dutch exchange APX Endex said in a statement. The global market of wood pellets is growing as a result of world-wide policies to cut CO2 emissions and replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy.

(Reuters) - The American eel, a freshwater fish native to the eastern United States that is born and dies in the open ocean, may be at risk of extinction because of climate change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Wednesday. The agency, which is considering a petition to add the eel to its official list of endangered species, said new scientific evidence, including "statistically significant long-term" declines in the stock of young eels, suggested the snake-like species is in enough peril to warrant federal protection.

By Nigel Hunt and Ikuko Kurahone LONDON (Reuters) - Major British independent oil firm Greenergy sees its future as an exploration company, but one that hunts for fuel in piles of stale pork pies and cakes rather than under the ground or from food crops. [More]

Most everything you need to know about a particle collider can be summed up with just two numbers. The first is its energy--higher energies let scientists conjure up more massive particles (measured in gigaelectron volts, or GeV). The second is its luminosity, or the number of collisions per second.

The Tevatron. Credit: Fermilab The storied Tevatron particle collider, the most powerful machine of its kind in the U.S.

TIANJIN ECO-CITY, China -- Three years ago, this coastal area fit perfectly into the dictionary definition for "wasteland." Its soil was too salty to grow crops. It was polluted enough to scare away potential residents. Sometimes the few fishermen who lived here saw investors driving in, but they quickly turned around and left, leaving nothing behind except dust

The biotechnology industry has had its share of woes, but so far 'patent trolls' have not numbered among them. These companies, which profit by legally enforcing patents they own rather than developing products, may benefit from a 31 August ruling at a US federal court of appeal in Washington DC.