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

An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended that the agency further study the link between food coloring and childhood hyperactivity, but said products that contain the dyes do not need package warnings.

BPA (bisphenol-A) is a potentially toxic estrogen-mimicking compound used in plastic production that has been linked to breast cancer, early puberty, infertility, and other maladies. It's dangerous enough that it has been banned in baby bottles in Europe, Canada, and even China--but not in the U.S. And it turns out that it's almost entirely unavoidable

Would you use a pair of skis made out meat and bone meal? What if it meant they were biodegradable and cut down on landfill waste?

Photographs by Malcolm Brown Imagine what creativity might erupt, says Linda Tischler, if design were taught in middle school. YEARS AGO, we had a running joke at Fast Company: What if we tallied up all the game-changing ideas CEOs claimed had come from their 13-year-old kids

A breakthrough in the study of chemical reactions during etching and coating of materials was achieved by a research group headed by Kiel physicist, Professor Olaf Magnussen. The team from the Christian-Albrechts-Universitat zu Kiel (CAU), Germany, in collaboration with staff from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, have uncovered for the first time just what happens in manufacturing processes, used for the formation of metal contacts thinner than a human hair in modern consumer electronics, such as flat-screen television. The results appear as the cover feature in the current issue of the renowned Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Two Stanford researchers have tested a confidence-boosting technique that dramatically increases the performance of minorities in college. Two Stanford researchers have found a free, universally accessible method of shrinking the college minority grade gap

Users pretty much ignore search ads, a new eye-tracking study says. So-called organic search results were viewed 100 percent of the time, and study participants—the study was conducted by user experience research firm User Centric —spent an average of 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at them on Google and Bing, respectively. (For tips on search engine optimization, click here .) But just over one-quarter of participants (28 percent) looked at right-side ads on Google, and just 21 percent did on Microsoft's Bing

New research is adding a Twittery flavor to the old adage "birds of a feather flock together," because it suggests happy twitterers tend to aggregate. Does this have implications for PR-related tweeters? In a paper titled "Happiness is assortative in online social networks," University of Indiana researcher Johan Bollen and other authors conclude that "Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics.

Rats are trying out the device, a 250-gram scanner-in-miniature. Scanning technology and behavioral observation can now work in tandem

A new study shows readers of iPad magazines find their attention wandering. A lot. And any way you spin it, that's a tricky finding for both publishers and advertisers.

A big breakthrough in the race for better biofuels was announced this week from the U.S. Department of Energy, where the department's BioEnergy Science Center figured out how to produce isobutanol, a gasoline-like fuel, directly from cellulose (i.e. corn stalks and switchgrass).

A millennium ago a physicist under house arrest rewrote the scientific understanding of optics--the study of the behavior and properties of light.

Wondering exactly what your employees are doing all day? Well, at least half their time is spent on e-mail.

According to a new study, women who earn more than their husbands are 40 percent more likely to get divorced than women who earn less than their spouse. TODAY’s Amy Robach discusses the study with a relationship and financial expert. (TODAY show)