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

In the struggle against widespread obesity that begins in early childhood , new research indicates that schools may be the best place to start a solution. [More]

Partner Bruce Gibney talks about what's hot, Facebook, and why Monday morning meetings aren't necessary. Founders Fund , investors in Facebook and Space X, last week announced it had raised $625 million for its fourth fund, larger than the first three funds combined.

The startup Womply recently brought us Groupon-like "effortless offers." Today it launches Loyalty Cloud, hoping to slice through the messy customer-loyalty market with the "simplest loyalty program ever for local merchants." Last month a new startup, Womply , launched to bring "effortless offers" schemes to local merchants--coming with an impressive pedigree because it's co-founder Brandt Squires was formerly GM and Head of Sales at LivingSocial . Just weeks later, Womply has an additional offering--Loyalty Cloud--that promises the same sort of effortless experience but for customer loyalty schemes, rather than Groupon -style "special offers." According to the new sitei, it's simplicity rests on the fact that, "Merchants create offers that reward customers for repeat visits and Womply handles everything else, from marketing and remitting offers to customers, to providing analysis and insight on the amount of revenue generated as a result." To this end, Womply's new Loyalty Cloud is trying to be a complete one-stop shop for local business loyalty schemes: Simpler even than stamping a rubber stamp on a collector card, and providing deep customer analytics that would be tricky to get any other way. It manages this by being seamless from a customer and merchant point of view, with the transaction happening "in the cloud" via "Womply's high-tech platform that enables the company to spot credit and debit card transactions at participating merchants and to push cash credits to customer payment cards." The whole thing is designed to be merchant-centric, rather than focussing on the deals or the end-user customers.

How will technology change our electoral process? Fast Company gets Crystal Ballin' with Keya Danenbaum, the founder of ElectNext, which applies the techniques of dating websites to representative democracy

By Ed Yong of Nature magazine It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife. But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people's sense of self.

Industry leaders may be intuitive, innovative, and able to handle risks, but real success requires them to be mature. We’ve all heard stories about the early start-up days of well-known tech companies like Apple, Microsoft and Facebook

In a year that saw a few highly proclaimed gadget introductions (the Amazon Kindle Fire , in particular) and some updates to high-profile staples such as Apple's iPhone and iPad , Scientific American takes a look at 10 gizmos that, if they did not land on your radar screen in 2011, deserve a look in the coming year. [More]

Elance CEO Fabio Rosati explains in an interview how young people should prepare for a future of independent work.

SAN FRANCISCO A mantra that has driven global negotiations on carbon dioxide emissions for years has been that policy-makers must prevent warming of more than two degrees Celsius to prevent apocalyptic climate outcomes. And, two degrees has been a point of no return, a limit directly or indirectly agreed to by negotiators at international climate talks. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, whose data since the 1980s has been central to setting that benchmark, said today that two degrees is too much.

You probably don’t often encounter [rattlesnake sound]. But snakebites are still a big concern for much of the world’s population.

In the quest to cure cancer, many researchers have started looking beyond toxic chemicals and harsh radiation and instead are trying to harness the body's immune system. [More]

SAN FRANCISCO - To get a glimpse of the future , look to East Africa today. [More]

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Human embryonic stem cells that are potentially pure enough to be used in therapies have been deposited into the UK Stem Cell Bank, and will soon be available across Europe.

Help researchers better understand influenza, the common cold and stomach flu [More]

“Three seconds to shoot. It’s Reggie! And it’s Indiana by eight!” Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant