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

By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazine Sound, like light, can be tricky to manipulate on small scales.

Dear EarthTalk : So many chemicals in everyday products are harmful to our health and the environment.

The United States is on the verge of losing its ability to monitor phytoplankton activity in the world's oceans from space, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday. The loss of satellite-based "ocean color" measurements would be a blow to climate science, because phytoplankton -- tiny ocean plants -- help regulate the global carbon cycle. Like plants on land, phytoplankton produce energy by photosynthesis, pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fuel the process

CAPE CANAVERAL -- I took this picture last night, and I don’t like it very much. [More]

FOOD FOR THOUGHT In the article on physical ailments influencing the brain, “ Ruled by the Body ,” Erich Kasten listed a number of medical conditions that can masquerade as mental disorders. To that list, I would add celiac disease, in which an intolerance to the gluten found in wheat and other grains causes an autoimmune reaction in the gut that prevents the absorption of crucial vitamins and minerals. The resulting malnutrition can cause fatigue, muddled thinking, anxiety and depression, along with many digestive symptoms

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER--4:14 A.M.

Atlantis Launch Notes: July 7, 6:00 P.M.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine Ahead of a key international meeting on tuna catches, an assessment is painting a bleak picture of the conservation status of some of the world's most commercially valuable fish species. Bruce Collette, who studies ocean fish at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, and his colleagues conducted the first global assessment of the scrombids and billfish, groups of fish that include some of the species with the highest value as seafood, such as tuna and marlin, as well as staples such as mackerel.

As NASA prepares to wrap up its shuttle program , leaving open questions about what comes next for U.S. human spaceflight, the next big thing in NASA's astronomy program has been dealt a blow

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics raised the profile of graphene --a super strong one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern with countless potential commercial applications.

By Richard A. [More]

Citizen scientists can spend some of those long, lazy summer nights helping researchers study diminishing firefly populations [More]

Dust on earthly objects is often an indicator of antiquity. But that is not always the case for cosmic objects, some of which have quite a bit of dust despite their relative youth

The search for beauty has spurred great works of art and music, lengthy philosophical treatises and decades of dense cultural criticism. So, is beauty in the object ?

Long, white vapor trails blending into cirrus clouds and cooling over southeastern England during World War II have led researchers to believe that contrails could influence climate.