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

The tweet, posted on September 1, 2011, by @qikipedia, read in its entirety: “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of cling film.” Some detective work revealed that the statement originated with mechanical engineering professor James Hone of Columbia University, who said in 2008, “Our research establishes graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel. It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap.” The professor’s contention raises numerous questions, the first one being “What is graphene?” Microsoft Word doesn’t know--it keeps giving graphene the red squiggly underline, which means, “Surely you mean grapheme.” (I surely don’t, despite the fact that I’m littering this page with graphemes.) [More]

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A round-trip journey to Mars would probably kill a crew of astronauts, unless they had some futuristic defense against radiation from the sun and from galactic cosmic rays. Would microbes be hardy enough to survive? We may soon find out

Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators.

Planetary scientists may soon get the dirt on a Martian moon--literally. A Russian spacecraft will soon depart for Phobos, the larger of Mars's two tiny moons. It will attempt to land there, scoop up some soil and return it to Earth for analysis.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union nations must nearly double investment in power grid building in the decade after 2020 if it is to get on the path to carbon-free electricity by the middle of the century, think-tank the European Climate Foundation (ECF) said on Monday. The European Commission raised the goal of virtually emissions-free electricity in its 2050 road map toward a low carbon economy, published earlier this year, as the means to achieve an 80-95 percent cut in carbon scientists say is needed by then to stave off the worst effects of global warming. [More]

By Steve Olafson OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - Fourteen homes were damaged late on Saturday in the largest earthquake to hit Oklahoma on record, emergency management officials said on Sunday. [More]

The giant marabou stork found at Liang Bua is an extinct relative of the modern marabou stork from Africa shown here. Credit: Lip Kee/Flickr via Creative Commons license LAS VEGAS–A study of bird remains from the same cave that yielded bones of a mini human species called Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the hobbit has cast new light on the lost world of this enigmatic human relative. The findings hint that the hobbits’ island home was quite ecologically diverse, and raise the possibility that the tiny humans had to defend their kills from giant carnivorous birds

The U.S. burns 900 million metric tons of coal per year. The combustion produces billions of tons of CO2, but also more than 100 million metric tons of coal ash , which includes nasty stuff like mercury and lead.

We are social animals. So you might assume our brains are built to excel when we cooperate with each other, as opposed to when we function in isolation

We are social animals.

Climbers struggling the last few steps to the peak of Makalu in the Himalayas have long marveled at the sight of bar-headed geese flying high above to their winter refuge in India. The birds cruise at an altitude of 29,500 feet, nearly as high as commercial aircraft. For years scientists believed that strong tailwinds and updrafts aided the geese on their journey

It’s that time of year in the U.S. when clocks “fall back” from Daylight Saving Time to standard time. What does that mean?

HOHHOT, China -- It was late spring, and armed police were barring Inner Mongolia University students from leaving campus to protest the death of a herder run over by a coal truck. Students amassed in towns across the province to condemn coal companies they accused of riding roughshod over livestock grazing land

HOHHOT, China -- It was late spring, and armed police were barring Inner Mongolia University students from leaving campus to protest the death of a herder run over by a coal truck. Students amassed in towns across the province to condemn coal companies they accused of riding roughshod over livestock grazing land.