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

Fans use an enormous amount of the world's electricity. But Jay Harmon's spiral-inspired model works like most of the natural world--nearly effortlessly. Nature likes spirals: Whirlpools, hurricanes, the way sap flows up a plant, even the shape of a human heart.

A decade ago layers of shale lying deep underground supplied only 1 percent of America’s natural gas. Today they provide 30 percent

Susan starts her day by jogging to the edge of town, cutting back through a cornfield for an herbal tea at the downtown Starbucks and heading home for a shower. It sounds like a healthy morning routine, but Susan is in fact exposing herself to a rogue’s gallery of chemicals: pesticides and herbicides on the corn, plasticizers in her tea cup, and the wide array of ingredients used to perfume her soap and enhance the performance of her shampoo and moisturizer. Most of these exposures are so low as to be considered trivial, but they are not trivial at all--especially considering that Susan is six weeks pregnant.

By Melissa Gaskill of Nature magazine Heart-breaking pictures of seabirds covered in black crude oil, arresting as they are, can miss the hidden story of an oil spill's impact on wildlife. Exposure to even tiny concentrations of the chemicals present in oil can also cause harmful biological effects that usually go unnoticed, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Dear EarthTalk : Isn’t spray sunscreen a health and environmental nightmare when it seems that more of the sunscreen ends up going up my nose than on the kid at the beach next to me? --Lillian Robertson, Methuen, Mass. Spray cans of sunscreen may no longer contain chlorofluorocarbons (also known as CFCs, which were phased out in the 1990s for causing holes in the stratospheric ozone layer), but many contain other chemicals that are not good for our health or the environment.

[Audio clip from The Graduate: One word, plastics.]

If you have to ask... Companies are required to submit to the EPA all studies about substantial risk that their chemicals pose to humans

Winter blues, spring fever--most of us take seasonal changes in mood for granted. According to a new study, the cause might be the seasons tinkering with the chemicals in our brain. As reported in the November 3 Journal of Neuroscience , researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health found evidence of seasonal differences in dopamine--a chemical messenger involved in motivation, pleasure, movement and learning.