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

The deadly mob violence that wracked England this past week has abated, as police came out in force and used surveillance images to track down and arrest some 1,900 alleged rioters. As London and other cities in the nation recover, officials and the public may be left wondering how to prevent such rioting in the first place. A key misunderstanding, however, seems to pervade popular thinking: that mobs are irrational and are driven to violence by a few bad apples

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazine Planetary scientists thought they knew what to expect when NASA's Dawn spacecraft returned the first close-up portrait of the giant asteroid Vesta last month. [More]

By Carey Gillam KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - The heavy use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide appears to be causing harmful changes in soil and potentially hindering yields of the genetically modified crops that farmers are cultivating, a government scientist said on Friday. [More]

By Jim Forsyth SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Scattered heavy rains brought badly needed relief to parched north and west Texas overnight, but forecasters said on Friday that the storms quickly passed and were not enough to break the devastating drought that has gripped the state.

This summer has seen the release of a blockbuster movie, acclaimed documentary and news-worthy research paper that all--in different but weirdly complementary ways--present sympathetic portraits of chimpanzees, our hirsute doppelgangers. [More]

By Yuko Inoue and Julie Gordon TOKYO/TORONTO (Reuters) - Japanese manufacturers concerned about China's restrictive export quotas on essential rare earths may have found a way to resolve their supply concerns -- relocate production to China. [More]

Dear EarthTalk : I don’t hear much about the environmental impacts of our consumer culture any more, but it seems to me that our “buy, buy, buy” mentality is a major contributor to our overuse of energy and resources.

Warning that famine in Somalia is likely to get worse before it gets better, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday pledged an additional $17 million in U.S. aid to East African countries racked by the worst drought in 60 years.

Regular readers will know that I often avoid discussing new palaeontological discoveries at Tet Zoo, the exceptions being those where I was personally involved (hmm). [More]

Brain: The Inside Story Through August 14, 2011 [More]

Red Planet Mars Life Lawrence M. Krauss’s “ Rethinking the Dream ” [Forum] rightly points out that the benefits of flying humans in space have not been commensurate with the cost, especially when human flight is compared with advanced robotic or automatic systems that can do many of the same tasks at one tenth of the cost and with no risk to humans.

What's the best way to find out if an unknown mixture contains a specific substance, like an environmental contaminant? You could use an expensive, bulky gas chromatograph--but Harvard researchers have developed an instrument you can carry in your pocket. They describe the device, called an inverse opal, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society .

This is not a climate science blog, nor is it a political or media critique blog.

When I was getting my solar panels installed, I couldn’t wait to see my electric meter literally spin backwards. [More]

By Zo