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

Human activities are pushing Earth toward a "tipping point" that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns. [More]

Dear EarthTalk : How do I learn about what pesticides may be on the food I eat? [More]

Imagine being an extraterrestrial geologist in geostationary orbit above the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. You’re the first explorers to reach Earth (underpants-thieving aliens aside), and you haven’t got a lot of data on this little blue marble

Map of current land and ice separating the Weddell and Ross seas, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Wutsje/CIA Octopuses have made themselves at home in most of the world’s oceans from the warmest of tropical seas to the deep, dark reaches around hydrothermal vents. Antarctic species , such as Turquet’s octopuses ( Pareledone turqueti ), even live slow, quiet lives near the South Pole . But these retiring creatures offer a rare opportunity to help understand how this extreme part of the Earth has changed in recent geologic times and what climate change might bring there in the near future.

Most organisms that live on or near the surface of the Earth or its oceans have evolved a circadian clock – a daily timer of all biochemical, physiological and behavioral functions.

Click to see full image, with diameters of Earth and Jupiter for scale. Credit: NASA/SDO Space weather forecasters are keeping a close watch on a large collection of sunspots that could unleash blasts of energy or charged particles toward Earth in the coming days. Sunspot region 1476, the dark patch resembling the Hawaiian Islands in the photo at left, is located near the center of the sun s face as seen from Earth but has yet to act out in any major way.

Whirling lumps of cold space rock could one day help power our economy. Really.

The reason so many would-be entrepreneurs fails is because they get too hung up on their ideas. You know that brilliant idea you have for a new website/smartphone app?

Interviewer: So, how powerful are you? Could you …say… destroy the Earth? Tick: Destroy the Earth?

Bot Vid: The Naval Robot That Fights Fires The Navy has a big plan to put smart gesture-controlled bipedla firebots onto ships. These droids are able to scramble through compartments designed for human access, so they'd be invaluable in a crisis, and they can handle fires that humans cannot. The plan needs much research, and the Octavia bot shows a step along the way.

Join a panel of scientists, scholars and public intellectuals, including primatologist Frans de Waal, international economic advisor and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs, experimental social psychologist Steven Neuberg, cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson and New York Times editorialist Charles Blow , as they discuss the biological and social dimensions of the timely issue of xenophobia, or the unreasonable fear of "others." [More]

Some 2.7 billion years ago in what is now Omdraaisvlei farm near Prieska, South Africa, a brief storm dropped mild rain on a new layer of ash laid down by a recent volcanic eruption (not unlike ash from the 2010 Eyjafjallaj

By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of the most interesting facets of a new United Nations climate change report is what's not in it: much mention of curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in Earth's atmosphere and in turn can spur some natural disasters. "It is a change," said Christopher Field, a top editor of the 600-page document released on Wednesday. [More]

Help solar scientists spot explosions on the Sun and track them across space to Earth [More]

LONDON -- The impact of human activity on the Earth is running out of control, and the amount of time in which action can be taken to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change is rapidly dwindling, a leading scientist from the Australian National University told a global scientific climate conference in London yesterday.