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

Will Al Qaeda respond to the death of Osama bin Lade n with serious cyber attacks? [More]

By Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib of Nature magazine On land, the pattern is a sadly familiar one: when an ecosystem is threatened, it is the large predators that usually suffer the greatest decline and therefore are most in need of protection. [More]

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Obesity and dementia have a well-established connection in the medical literature. But a new study shows that just being overweight--with a BMI of 25 or above--in middle age might also significantly increase the odds that a person develops dementia later in life. [More]

A new advance in solar cells that tips the surface with minuscule cone structures could neutralize manufacturing defects, boosting efficiency up to 80 percent. In conventional solar panels, more than 50 percent of the charges generated by sunlight are lost due to defects, said Jun Xu, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The irregularities in the formation of the crystalline structure of solar cells can trap electrons and limit the transfer of sunlight to electrical energy.

Osama Bin Laden is dead . At least, that's what we've been told, and I tend to believe such things. But how do they know it's him

For the author of Moby-Duck , Donovan Hohn , it all started with a school assignment. In 2008, he challenged his journalism class to find the "archaeology of the ordinary." A student, known to be a bit of an odd one, wrote his assignment on his lucky rubber duck.

If the solar system were a Peanuts cartoon, the role of Pigpen would be played by a comet.

If you speak multiple languages, you might have multiple personalities.

We learned all kinds of things from our parents--manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us science knowledge--even though they may not have known a lot about psychology, physiology, chemistry, physics or animal adaptation. In learning by doing, young children get support for their later formal education: they build a set of experiences that they can recall and relate to new information in middle school science classes and beyond.

Even if one was allowed to make a volcano explode, creating the flows of interest looks impossible In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

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Key concepts Liquids and solids [More]

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