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

Drive through the Midwest and it's only a matter of time before you hit corn and soy fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. It's no surprise, really--the U.S. government lavishes the two industries with cash, spending $15.4 billion in subsidies for corn, cotton, rice, wheat, and soybeans in 2009 alone.

The Tata Group continues its ever-expanding quest to bring resources to low-income citizens of the world, this time with an announcement that it has joined up with MIT scientist Daniel Nocera, founder of SunCatalytix , to create power from water. Specific terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Apple today announced that Bertrand Serlet, its senior vice president of Mac® Software Engineering, will be leaving the company after 14 years.

Now here's an incredible idea : A super-thin transparent screen coating for smartphones that could continuously top off your battery with solar power. The technology is coming out of a small company called Wysips , which has perfected a transparent coating less than 100 microns deep that captures enough energy from the sun to generate electrical power. It relies on the application of super-thin strips of photovoltaic cells laid down on a display screen, and then a precise layer of cylindrical lenticular lenses deposited on top

Last night, Zynga brought virtual reality to real life. At a press event in New York City, the social gaming giant erected highly detailed sets for its most popular games, including a pastoral landscape complete with watering cans and crates of actual FarmVille apples; a dusty old-western saloon for FrontierVille; and an upstairs speakeasy with bartenders serving 1920s-style cocktails in honor of Mafia Wars

SodaStream now touts natural syrups and the eco-friendliness of homemade soda.

Illustration by I Love Dust Why Bloomberg broke into the business of measuring other companies' good deeds. Curtis Ravenel spearheads Bloomberg's program to include enviromental data on its terminals. | Photograph Courtesy of Bloomberg SOON AFTER Bloomberg's sustainability director, Curtis Ravenel, launched an initiative to green the company's operations in 2006, he began to wonder: How do other businesses measure their impact on the environment?

Incorporating sustainability into any company's operations is a hefty issue. But it's also an increasingly popular shift to make. "It's an increasing liability to not do it," says Summer Rayne Oakes, co-founder and CEO of Source4Style , the online fabric marketplace, which is based in New York City

Summiteers Jeff Rosenthal (far left), Natalie Spilger, and Thayer Walker prep for the gathering. | Photograph by Jeffery Salter The Summit Series is the next big wave in the conference world, thanks to its doing-good-while-feeling-good attitude. WHAT DO RICHARD BRANSON , a 7-foot-long sandbar shark, and the Dalai Lama's spiritual adviser have in common

Writing a Business Plan, Section by Section Are you starting a business?

Looking to capitalize on the growing wave of excitement over all things green? Consider attending a green MBA program. Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine just released their first rankings of the top 16 green MBA programs in the U.S.--a list that includes perennial favorites like Columbia University, Duke University, Stanford University, and New York University

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

The same company behind the popular Roomba robocleaner is producing an underwater robot that can stay below the surface for months.

Forget sending huge, expensive remote-controlled robot probes to Mars--could a swarm of smaller, cheaper units that roam the surface using honeybee-like thinking actually do the job better? Just last week, NASA's next Martian rover Curiosity got its first taste of Mars-like conditions inside a pressure and atmospheric chamber designed to simulate the kind of environment it'll encounter when it actually lands on Mars's regolith several years from now. It's a huge, complex process to get this huge (9-foot long, 2,000 pound), complex vehicle ready for its scientific mission

New smartphone technologies target parents worried about reckless teen drivers. The market's so hot, apparently, that even average GPS companies are marketing in this space