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

Lions are one of just six carnivores that remain in East Africa today, compared with more than 15 species that shared the landscape before the dawn of Homo. Image: Kate Wong The impact of Homo sapiens on the environment over the past few hundred years has been so profound that some scientists term this chapter of Earth s history the Anthropocene . But humans may have begun wreaking ecological havoc far, far earlier than that.

Occupy Wall Street websites love adding Google, Facebook, and Twitter buttons--which could give law enforcement a handy back door to track users' actions--and identities. Big Data is everywhere. Occupy Wall Street protesters, however, are dealing with a special challenge: Online marketers and analytics firms tracing the minutiae of their lives--including their email contacts and physical location--and possibly passing the information on to law enforcement.

By Eric Hand of Nature magazine When it comes to doing science on the International Space Station (ISS), the laws of gravity have been flipped: what goes up mostly stays up. [More]

The Internet gives angry customers a megaphone; even one angry one can do a lot of damage. Here's how to defend your company and defuse a crisis.

I’m sorry. Very, truly sorry.

For decades now physicists have contemplated the idea of an entire shadow world of elementary particles, called supersymmetry. It would elegantly solve mysteries that the current Standard Model of particle physics leaves unexplained, such as what cosmic dark matter is.

Becoming a more charismatic leader can help your company. It can also trip it up. Very few leadership attributes have as dangerous a downside as charisma.

Cave-riddled hills jut steeply from the flat pine savanna of Runaway Creek Nature Reserve in Belize. Tapirs, jaguars and wild pigs call the forest-blanketed hillsides home.

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) in Beijing has taken the lead among the country's publishers in trying to clamp down on academic misconduct. [More]

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]

Even a 20-something billionaire could use a little help. He just got it from Microsoft--via a huge heap of AOL patents.

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