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

Would you love your Roomba more if it had rat-like whiskers?

News flash: Entrepreneurs are people too. And as with any group of people, it includes a few bad eggs--and some downright rotten ones

If 2012 is the year of Big Data, it will likely be the year vendors and consultants start to over-promise, under-deliver, and put processes in motion that will generate insights and potential risks for years to come. This year will be the year of Big Data.

"We're rapidly moving to a world beyond plastic," says Ed McLaughlin. "In many ways, plastic is just convenient packaging." McLaughlin heads up emerging payments at MasterCard, and he's tasked with thinking big on the future of transaction technology. His group has dreamed up loads of creative ways to accept payments, from hacking an Xbox Kinect to pay-by-hand motion, to implanting NFC tech in ultrabooks , to scanning irises to prevent credit card fraud.

It may be surprising to hear that hydraulic fracturing is not the cause of water contamination , but what may be even more surprising is that shale gas produced using fracking may have lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gas. According to a recent Environmental Science and Technology report , shale gas life-cycle [greenhouse gas] emissions are 6% lower than conventional natural gas [More]

(PhysOrg.com) -- Custom modifications of equipment are an honored tradition of the research lab. In a recent paper, two materials scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology describe how a relatively simple mod of a standard scanning electron microscope (SEM) enables a roughly 10-fold improvement in its ability to measure the crystal structure of nanoparticles and extremely thin films. By altering the sample position, they are able to determine crystal structure of particles as small as 10 nanometers.

The computers that control large industrial control systems the sewage plants, power stations, and assembly lines that keep civilization running aren’t supposed to be online. Computers online tend to get hacked, of course, and you wouldn’t want your local power plant under rogue control . But a graduate student was able to locate and map more than 10,000 industrial control systems that are directly connected to the Internet, as reported by Kim Zetter at Wired’s Threat Level Blog .

Long, hard stares are nothing new to computer users, particularly when their PCs have crashed or their screens are frozen. In the near future those stares will let us do more than merely convey anger to our silicon friends. Developers of eye-tracking technology already a tool to help the disabled interact with specialized computers and to let market researchers evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns have turned their attention to Windows PCs and video game consoles

HP, Best Buy, and JetBlue reveal how they use Twitter's enhanced profile pages to make every tweet sing. It’s still officially in velvet-rope mode, but Twitter’s enhanced profile pages are heavily in play for those brands among the first to sign up. So how are the early reviews?

Scientists have developed a new way to create electromagnetic Terahertz (THz) waves or T-rays - the technology behind full-body security scanners. The researchers behind the study, published recently in the journal Nature Photonics, say their new stronger and more efficient continuous wave T-rays could be used to make better medical scanning gadgets and may one day lead to innovations similar to the 'tricorder' scanner used in Star Trek.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology and Purdue University have designed and fabricated an on-chip microresonator that converts continuous laser light into ultra-short pulses consisting of a mix of well-defined frequencies, a technology with applications in advanced sensors, communications systems, and metrology.

Ultra hot quark-gluon-plasma, generated by heavy-ion collisions in particle accelerators, is supposed to be the "most perfect fluid" in the world. Previous theories imposed a limit on how "liquid" fluids can be

Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is arguably one of the most famous foundations of quantum physics. It says that not all properties of a quantum particle can be measured with unlimited accuracy.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The world's most accurate metronome keeps stroke to an incredible 10 quintillionth of a second. The device enables slow-motion pictures from the world of molecules and atoms, scientists from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg, Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report.

Humankind’s efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these tech