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

Roughly 10,000 years ago, the great sheets of ice that had covered much of the planet receded, triggering a wave of extinctions, ecological changes and, ultimately, the rise of human civilization . All those changes came about as roughly 30 percent of the planet's surface went from ice-covered to ice-free

Chroniclers of his time called him ‘despicable’, ‘mistrustful’ and ‘jealous’, and a rivalrous Isaac Newton might have had the only surviving portrait of him burnt, but, three centuries on, Robert Hooke is now regarded as one of the great Enlightenment scientists.

A new archaeological find may signify one of the great leaps in human cultural and cognitive history. Because researchers have discovered a 100,000-year-old art studio

I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. In an August 1995 profile of him for Scientific American I summed up his worldview, which emphasizes the role of randomness, or "contingency," in shaping life, as "shit happens." [More]