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

Carmela Cuomo thought she had the secret within reach, hidden in a shallow black tank at the NOAA marine fisheries laboratory in Milford, Conn. The horseshoe crabs she had plucked from New Haven Harbor in 2000 trundled about their springtime ritual, digging pits in the sand, laying their eggs and fertilizing them.

Workers at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant fighting to keep additional radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium and other harmful elements from being released into the environment are monitored daily for exposure to radiation. The same is true of the police and firefighters scouring the area within 10 kilometers of the plant for missing people. [More]

A major dark matter experiment has taken a swipe with its technological net in the hopes of catching some of the elusive particles that make up the universe's missing mass, and once again that net has come up empty. But in swiping and missing, the Xenon100 experiment has closed in a bit tighter on where dark matter--the invisible stuff theorized to outweigh the ordinary matter in the universe by a factor of five--might be hiding. [More]

Following the motions of a specific molecule inside a cell is no easy task 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.

Do animals give much thought to voluntary behavior? Before you or I reach for a cup of coffee, we make a conscious--even if barely so--decision to do it

Be kind to your bicycle, for you may need it more than it needs you. [More]

By Joanna Marchant of Nature magazine Female athletes may not be eligible to compete as women if they have natural testosterone levels in the male range. [More]

Earthworms laying on sidewalks or streets after a heavy spring rain has become commonplace, but why do they do this ... and could they be a travel hazard? Researchers hypothesize several reasons why heavy rain storms bring crawlers out of their soil homes

Some endangered species on the brink of extinction might not be worth saving, according to a new algorithm developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide and James Cook University, both in Australia. Dubbed the SAFE (species' ability to forestall extinction) index, the formula takes current and minimum viable population sizes into account to determine if it is too costly to save a species from extinction

The fiscal 2011 budget compromise crafted by the White House and congressional leaders would delay a key federal climate and weather satellite program, making a lengthy gap in critical environmental data a near certainty. Cuts contained in the 2011 budget plan would push back the launch of the first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) orbiter by at least 18 months past the current 2016 target, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said yesterday.

When we launched Scientific American Mind as a new publication in 2004, it seemed like a great opportunity to give readers more stories about popular areas of mind and brain research--which, fortuitously, were also booming because of imaging and other advances. What I didn’t realize at the time, but probably should have, is how often the findings in our pages would shake loose what I thought I knew about how our gray matter works

For someone who died at the age of 32, the largely self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan left behind an impressive legacy. Number theorists have now finally managed to make sense of one of his more enigmatic statements, written just one year before his death in 1920.

It was a through-the-looking-glass moment for Chris Goldfinger, sitting in a meeting about Sumatran earthquakes on a recent Friday afternoon in Chiba, Japan, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

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By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Before committing suicide at the age of 22, an anonymous man with schizophrenia donated a biopsy of his skin cells to research. [More]