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

It happened in 1995.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Mara Hvistendahl's book , Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. The technology that ultimately became the dominant method of sex selection around the world began as a tool for navigation. The story of ultrasound dates to 1794, when an Italian biologist curious about how bats find their way in the dark discovered sonar, or the fact that distance can be determined by bouncing sound waves off a faraway object and measuring how long it takes for the waves to ricochet back

Cyber attacks may not be a new phenomenon but the recent successes scored against high-profile targets including CitiGroup , Google , RSA and government contractors such as Lockheed Martin underscore the targets' current failure to block security threats enabled by the Internet. Malicious hackers use the very same technology that enables online banking, entertainment and myriad other communication services to attack these very applications, steal user data, and then cover their own tracks. [More]

Anthony Weiner, the once cheered, now shamed New York congressman, made at least two mistakes in the past two weeks. First, he lied, and then he cried. "I have exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years," he admitted, after denying three days earlier that he publicly posted an R-rated picture of himself via Twitter

Journalist Jeffrey Bartholet talks about his June Scientific American magazine article on the attempts to grow meat in the lab, and Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina talks about the cover piece in the May issue on radical energy solutions. Web sites related to this episode include "Inside The Meat Lab " and "7 Radical Energy Solutions". [More]

The tomb of King Tutenkhamen – better known as King Tut – has raised many questions over the years. What killed the young king?

By David Fogarty CANBERRA (Reuters) - Charlie Bragg gazes across his lush fields where fat lambs are grazing, his reservoirs filled with water, and issues a sigh of relief. Things are normal this year and that's a bit unusual of late

By Sean Mattson CERRO SAPO, Panama (Reuters) - The harlequin frog that hops and swims the rocky streams of a damp niche of Toad Mountain in eastern Panama's dense tropical jungle has probably been on Earth for around 3 million years.

Dear EarthTalk : What has the nature of the agreement just forged between green groups and the U.S. government for wolf protection in the Northern Rockies? --Peggy Marshall, Boise, Idaho [More]

When Catherine Chalmers headed to Costa Rica for the third time this past January, she had a script in mind that told a very specific story: the stripping of nature.

Twenty-three duct-taped packages chilled in a refrigerator at Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., for months before scientists finally got up the nerve last December to pull them out and peel them open. Neil Pederson's team had initially chickened out. His tree-ring experts knew that the 200-year-old fragments inside were of interest to more than just their fellow dendrochronologists

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine The spacesuits worn by the first astronauts are falling apart from old age. [More]

BEIJING (Reuters) - Torrential rain in two drought-stricken central China provinces triggered landslides and brought down houses, killing at least 44 people and leaving 33 missing, state media said on Friday. The number of people evacuated from the city of Xianning in Hubei province rose to 100,000 by Friday evening, with thousands still stranded, official news agency Xinhua said. [More]

The World Science Festival is a place where one goes to see the giants of science, many of whom are household names (at least in scientifically inclined households) like E.O Wilson, Steven Pinker and James Watson, people on top of their game in their scientific fields, as well as science supporters in other walks of life, including entertainment - Alan Alda, Maggie Gullenhal and Susan Sarandon were there, among others - and journalism (see this for an example , or check out more complete coverage of the Festival at Nature Network ). With so many exciting sessions, panels and other events at the Festival, it was hard to choose which ones to attend.

One of the few exceptions to the old saying “everybody is afraid of something” is a 44-year-old woman known to psychologists as patient SM.