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

A newborn’s immune system needs time to figure out what should be fought and what should be left alone. Conventional wisdom had it that early exposure to potential troublemakers, from peanuts to pets, could lead to allergy issues later. But recent research shows that having a dog or cat at home isn't likely to make children allergic to animals

By Daniel Cressy of Nature magazine Many people affected by mental illness are facing a bleak future as drug companies abandon research into the area and other funding providers fail to take up the slack, according to a new report.

LONDON -- One of the driest spring seasons on record in northern Europe has sucked soils dry and sharply reduced river levels to the point that governments are starting to fear crop losses and France, in particular, is bracing for blackouts as its river-cooled nuclear power plants may be forced to shut down. [More]

* Airlines ground flights to Argentine, Uruguay airports * Chilean volcano has been erupting since June 4 [More]

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The mystery of human consciousness appears routinely as one of the greatest science problems of all time. One way to get a grip on this seemingly ineffable property would be to build a conscious machine.

There is some speculation among some politicians and pundits that the fog of war will soon extend to the Internet, if it has not already, given a recent report that the U.S. Defense Department will introduce its first cyber warfare doctrine this month, combined with similar announcements from the governments of Australia, China and the U.K.

When the internet first got kicking, some scholars of democracy and civil society thought that online discussions could create what they called a "conversational democracy”: an ongoing town hall without bricks and mortar. But the internet may not be as democratic as they'd imagined, according to a study in the journal Communication Research .

It came from outer space. It being the stuff of life--amino acids, sugars and other organic molecules. [More]

Sprawl isn't just eating up the countryside--it's also blocking the breezes that would otherwise clear out air pollution. That's according to a new study of Houston from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research

It happened in 1995.

Anthony Weiner, the once cheered, now shamed New York congressman, made at least two mistakes in the past two weeks. First, he lied, and then he cried. "I have exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years," he admitted, after denying three days earlier that he publicly posted an R-rated picture of himself via Twitter

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine Research groups at the Tevatron, the proton-antiproton collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have reached starkly different conclusions about a possible sighting of new particles beyond what is expected under the standard model of particle physics. In April, researchers on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment reported tentative evidence that particles not predicted by the standard model had surfaced in collisions that produced a W boson--a particle of the weak nuclear force--and jets of other particles. [More]

By Jonny Hogg KINSHASA (Reuters) - Beekeeping and breeding animals such as cane rats for food are needed to help tackle the unsustainable trade in bush meat in central Africa, conservation experts said on Friday. [More]

Snowpack in the northern Rocky Mountains has shrunk at an unusually rapid pace during the past 30 years, according to a new study. The decline is "almost unprecedented" over the past 800 years, say researchers who used tree rings to reconstruct a centuries-long record of snowpack throughout the entire Rocky Mountain range