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

A rendering of the exterior of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences' Nature Research Center Imagine walking through a science museum and, among the usual displays of dinosaur bones, butterflies, and amphibians you come upon a series of windows into state-of-the-art research labs. Inside, scientists from nearby universities and veterinary schools work on projects related to biodiversity, genetics, nanoparticles, and animal health and welfare. In front of each window is a touch screen.

As you know from my last post , I am staunch proponent of open access to scientific information, especially the variety that I paid for by virtue of taxation . The Research Works Act ( HR3699 ) being proposed now will lock away taxpayer funded research from the hands of those whose hard-earned wages funded the research. It’s really a no-brainer and the NIH compromise was generous, allowing publishers to make a profit from research works for a whole year, during the crucial access time for new articles

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results will be published tomorrow (Wednesday) in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum.

The scene at first resembles many that play out daily in the war-torn Red Zone of southern Afghanistan: a pair of Black Hawk helicopters descend on a hillside near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. As the choppers land, U.S. marines leap out, assault rifles ready.

The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more than a dozen newfound "super-Earths," and strong indications that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to an almost unfathomable number of planets awaiting discovery. [More]

In things thick and thin: Cornell physicists explain how fluids – such as paint or paste - behave by observing how micron-sized suspended particles dance in real time. Using high-speed microscopy, the scientists unveil how these particles are responding to fluid flows from shear – a specific way of stirring.

A note from the Editor in Chief: Scientific American is celebrating its 166th year. Given its history as the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., it's probably no surprise that it has touched the lives and career paths of many readers--including the scientists who write articles for us and whose work we cover. So, as often happens, when I met Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, while we were serving as judges for the Google Science Fair , we got to chatting about Scientific American

(PhysOrg.com) -- It's been seven months since Italian physicists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi publicly demonstrated a device that they claimed could generate large amounts of excess heat through some kind of low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR). (Previous descriptions of the process as “cold fusion” are incorrect; although the process is not completely understood, it is likely a weak interaction involving neutrons, without fusion.) The physicists call this device the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat.

Most people spend a major chunk of their waking hours at work, where often the boss looms large. Just how influential the boss is on an employee’s self-image might depend on culture, a study in the February 16 PLoS ONE reports

More than a decade ago, the frequency comb technique was developed at the Max Planck In-stitute of Quantum Optics by Professor Theodor W. H

Imagine hanging out with some of the world’s kookiest critters in the jungle’s tallest trees, building a robot that does stand-up comedy, inventing a device that propels you into the air like Batman, or traveling back in a DNA time machine to study ancient animals! Meet the scientists who make it possible.

We know that at the heart of at least two ocean basins--the North Pacific and the North Atlantic--tiny plastic fragments the size of confetti or smaller are accumulating on the sea surface by the tens of thousands, the remnants of discarded grocery bags, cups, bottles and other waste. Last year a group of researchers publishing in the journal Science reported a mystery: during a 22-year survey of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic, the scientists saw no increase in the amount of plastic, despite a surge in annual global plastic production from about 75 million to 245 million metric tons over the same period. Where was it going

(PhysOrg.com) -- Quantum physicists from the University of Innsbruck (Austria) have set another world record: They have achieved controlled entanglement of 14 quantum bits (qubits) and, thus, realized the largest quantum register that has ever been produced. With this experiment the scientists have not only come closer to the realization of a quantum computer but they also show surprising results for the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement.