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

Today, an image of a zipper runs down Google s home page in celebration of the 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback, who helped make the device an indispensable item for today’s man on the go. (Read that as you will.) Sundback did not invent the slide fastener, as it is generically called (“zipper” is actually a trade name for a version developed by the B.F. Goodrich company).

Want to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle?

The asteroid Vesta In a widely anticipated announcement today, the new company Planetary Resources revealed their plans for near-Earth asteroid domination. The group has mapped out a multi-stage process to map, observe, capture, tow and eventually mine asteroids for valuables. “A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the platinum group metals mined in history,” reads the company’s press release .

Online game informs researchers and policy makers about caring for watershed areas [More]

A flowering shrub from the Andean cloud forests made taxonomic history last month. The plant--now dubbed Brunfelsia plowmaniana --had puzzled botanists for decades as they endeavored to determine whether or not it was truly an evolutionary newcomer

Earth is under siege from outer space! In a way.

Gone are the days of riding in the family station wagon, inhaling smelly, sooty fumes from a noisy diesel engine.

On day 3 of the Experimental Biology conference, I listened to a fascinating talk on cognitive dysfunction following chemotherapy, how we can study it, and how we might go about treating it. Check it out.

This is the question that bounced around my head after I read through the results of the latest Energy Poll out of The University of Texas at Austin . Every six months the poll asks a sample of Americans their views towards energy technologies and policies

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/fotokon Although cocaine makes people feel more alert and on top of things in the moment, it can leave users vulnerable to a much slower brain in the long run.

By Jonny Hogg and Ed Stoddard KINSHASA/KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa (Reuters) - The hit job was done by professionals who swooped over their quarry in a helicopter before opening fire. The scene beneath the rotor blades would have been chilling: panicked mothers shielding their young, hair-raising screeches and a mad scramble through the blood-stained bush as bullets rained down from the sky. When the shooting was over, 22 elephants lay dead, one of the worst such killings in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in living memory

Guest Blog by Leonard Mlodinow* Belonging to a group is good for your health. Courtesy of joncandy via Flickr.

(Phys.org) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have designed a method to evaluate different conductors for use in metamaterial structures, which are engineered to exhibit properties not possible in natural materials. The work was reported this month in Nature Photonics.

When we meet new people, we assess their character by watching their gestures and facial expressions. Now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests that those nonverbal cues are communicating the presence of a specific form of a gene that makes us more or less responsive to others’ needs. [More]

(Phys.org) -- New collaborative research has revealed the most efficient method to date for packing spherical objects into a cylinder. Dr Ho-Kei Chan, a Research Fellow from the Foams and Complex Systems research group at Trinity’s School of Physics, has developed an algorithm for sphere packing which finds an arrangement in which the spheres fit as densely as possible into the cylinder provided, an issue that has a broad range of applications.