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

New techniques in DNA retrieval from dead animals might change the balance in the often fruitless quest to stop the poaching of endangered species.

In this charming music video from Chipotle, Willie sings about going "back to the start" of American farming, before animals were pumped with antibiotics and kept in factories. A farmer, not content with his small family farm, starts to modernize. He turns his farm into a factory, pumping drugs into his pigs and pollutants into the water

Even if you don't care about the environment or animal welfare, you should care about this: The antibiotics conventional farms pump into their birds results in deadly bacteria that doesn't respond to normal treatment. Forget whether it tastes better or is nicer to the bird. Non-organic chickens are a public health issue.

Sea lampreys leave a swath of destruction as the invasive species chomps through the Great Lakes. Attempts to manage them have relied in part on pheromones that attract the animals.

By Zo

Researchers at MIT have figured out how to grow "humanized" livers inside of mice--so the little critters could soon accurately predict how our livers will respond to drugs. Mice are a boon to biomedical research; they can often predict how humans will react to certain conditions, and not too many people get upset if they die from an overdose of toxic chemicals. But mice aren't as useful in pharmaceutical research because their livers react to drugs differently than human livers

Dear EarthTalk : What are the major issues with protecting migratory birds that groups like the Nature Conservancy are working on?

Whales can boom their songs across thousands of kilometers of ocean, and elephants' low-frequency calls can be heard by other pachyderms several kilometers away. But when body size is taken into consideration, these mammoth mammals produce but a relative whisper compared with other animals--especially one odd arthropod. [More]

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Wildlife advocates are protesting a government plan to kill an undetermined number of bison from Yellowstone National Park after scientists conduct a birth-control experiment on the animals with an EPA-registered pesticide. [More]

Anxiety, it seems, varies widely from one person to the next. What leaves you in a knot of angst may not even faze your friend. But two new studies show that during a crisis, anxiety seems to be contagious; you and your friends will probably ultimately arrive at the same anxiety level

Dog-friendly work environments are one new trend making companies friendlier, more collaborative, and ultimately more productive. Leib Lurie never intended for his company, message delivery service One Call Now, to be pet-friendly. But his dog, Ivy, had other ideas.

Other animals have been used to help kids with developmental disabilities, but Thai program is first to enlist elephants

The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson. Bloomsbury Press, 2011 [More]

The May 3 death of a Marsican brown bear ( Ursus arctos marsicanus ) has put the world's rarest bear subspecies one step closer to extinction. Just 50 or so of the animals remain in two of Italy's national parks, a population so small that the bears are "below the threshold of survival," Giuseppe Rossi, head of the National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise, told The Christian Science Monitor

Think you've honed your 4H chops with hours of online agriculture? You can now control a real British farm to see how you do. God save the cows