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

By Hereward Holland MANYANI, Kenya (Reuters) - Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki set fire to five tonnes of contraband ivory on Wednesday, a symbol of his and Africa's renewed commitment to fight poaching.

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Fukushima task force has confronted the commissioners with a central quandary of their mission: When are nuclear plants safe enough? The six-person Near-Term Task Force that dived into the implications of Japan's nuclear disaster concluded in its July 12 report that "continued operation and continued licensing activities do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety." [More]

By Katy Migiro NAIROBI (Reuters) - The United Nations declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia Wednesday and said it could quickly spread unless donors took action.

Every week, I will post a quick Q&A with one of our new bloggers on the network, so you can get to know them better. [More]

By Barbara Lewis and Henning Gloystein LONDON/DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - The accelerating dash for natural gas risks a bitter backlash as the environmental cost of exploiting new shale deposits and of transporting it in liquid form spoil its credentials as the greenest fossil fuel. [More]

While the bloggers are so prolific (you have to remember they had to wait several months until the launch, having blog posts all written and ready to go in advance) I feel I need to do these summaries almost daily. [More]

Medieval armor certainly looks heavy. And now researchers have demonstrated how the protection might have unwittingly put its wearers at a heavy disadvantage on the battlefield. An armored combatant in the 1400s had between about 60-to-110-pounds of steel on his head and body

by Chloe McIver of Nature magazine Turtles should sit on the same branch of the tree of life as lizards, according to a genetic analysis that could clear up a long-standing mystery over the creature's origin. Palaeontologists have long used morphological data, obtained by looking closely at the physical characteristics of fossils and living relatives, to show the evolutionary relationship between different species.

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An iconic species of the American West, the whitebark pine, is at risk of extinction from climate change and disease, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Tuesday, but no immediate action is planned.

By Nic Fleming of Nature magazine The movement of cholesterol in and out of cells takes much longer than previously thought, according to new measurements of the phenomenon in artificial cell membranes. [More]

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine As the space shuttle glides through its final week, another arm of the US space program faces a bleak future. [More]

Despite common parlance, oil is not a singular substance but rather a toxic stew of many different hydrocarbons that comes out of the ground mixed with natural gas. The oil that spewed from BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico last year was no different--and now a precise measurement of its chemical composition has been published July 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

More than a quarter of American adults have what’s called poor health literacy. They're likely to have trouble interpreting important written health information --or have difficulties communicating well with doctors and nurses. But does that mean they're actually more likely to miss taking scheduled medications or get sick?

What will you find living in your backyard? [More]