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

V ANCOUVER Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good . The long-running accelerator had been eclipsed by the vastly more powerful Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, which since 2010 has been generating data at an impressive rate. The move appeared to quash any hopes that Fermilab had of discovering the Higgs boson , the last great known unknown of modern particle physics.

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine Difficulties in hiring and retaining women scientists and engineers are worrying universities. [More]

By Katherine Rowland of Nature magazine In the Congo Basin, Bayaka pygmies patrol their forests with handheld tracking devices. [More]

McGill researchers test a rat's pain threshold One of brain researchers’ closest brushes with science fiction in the last 10 years came with the discovery of a chemical that could completely wipe out memory, a molecule that evoked a real-life version of the scenario depicted in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , in which a couple undertakes a procedure to erase their memory of each other when the relationship falls apart. [More]

Apparently, humans aren't the only species whose relationships can suffer from stress.

Yelp, the user-generated review site based in San Francisco, priced shares of its IPO between $12 and $14, and seeks to raise nearly $100 million in its upcoming IPO. On the heels of Facebook's much-buzzed-about S-1 , Yelp, another Bay Area tech company, is one step closer to going public

Meet Marci Harris, who wants to fix your broken line of communication to Congress. Marci Harris is the CEO of PopVox , a website that lets organizations and individuals weigh in on legislation making its way through Congress. Fast Company caught up with Harris to discuss the novelty of laptops in caucus meetings, the uselessness of tweeting at your Congressperson, and the difficulty of parsing the phrase, “Save the whales.” FAST COMPANY: So you’ve created a new way for Congress to ignore us

Beyonce and Jay-Z recently

Image courtesy of Save the Tasmanian Devil Program A killer cancer that is threatening to wipe Tasmanian devils off the map for good has been spreading from an original infected female 15 years ago via live cancer cells, according to evidence from genome sequences of the cancer and the animal, published online Thursday in Cell . Finding out how this happened could help save this species from extinction and it could also prepare researchers for the unlikely event that a contagious cancer ever appeared in humans. [More]

Bessemer Venture Partners picked up a piece of everyone's favorite pinboard site back when it was barely making a blip on the Silicon Valley radar. Jeremy Levine tells us why he decided it was a good bet

Back in December 2011, The Guardian USA and New York University’s Studio20 (see their Tumblr – note: I am associated with the program ) announced a new joint project – US presidential election 2012: the citizens agenda .

By Tansa Musa YAOUNDE (Reuters) - Poachers have killed more than 200 elephants in Cameroon in just six weeks, in a "massacre" fuelled by Asian demand for ivory. A local government official said heavily armed poachers from Chad and Sudan had decimated the elephant population of Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon's far north in a dry season killing spree.

Travel lighter! Get more work done! Never run out of power! Don't leave home without these tech essentials. I travel frequently in my job as a reporter—in fact, I’m typing this on a plane right now. After each trip, I start to evaluate which gadgets I used the most, which apps I found most useful, and—most importantly—which gadget mistakes I made.

If you've ever been on the phone in a crowded room…hold on… [More]

We’re not the only animals that like to knock back the hard stuff. Studies have shown that some mammals seek out food and drink that naturally contains alcohol. And according to new research, fruit flies will purposely hit the bottle: to self-medicate.