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

My desk used to have a very large pile of envelopes stacked in the corner. It included notices from various agencies in the states in which our employees live, pitches from would-be business partners, personal correspondence, and too many other things to list. Under the desk was a box, which contained all of the stuff that had been crowded off my desk

"Oh, great! Another cupcake shop!" I hear these words as soon as I step onto M Street, the posh, townhouse-lined retail thoroughfare in Washington, D.C., and most lately the raging epicenter of the great American cupcake pandemic. I'm standing in front of an outpost of Sprinkles, a California cupcake chain that joined the fray just the week before.

As a kid, I often spent an afternoon after a big rain storm with my brothers tromping down to a local drainage stream to see what the water had washed in. And it wasn't unusual to find us sitting around the kitchen table with our hands coated in a green, oozy cornstarch-and-water mixture, wondering at its weird properties.

Former Wall Street Journal fashion journalist Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan was toying with the idea of writing a food memoir when she was laid off in 2009. She promptly landed a book deal and spent the next year traveling to Singapore to research what became the just-out A Tiger in the Kitchen

Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh | Photograph by Bill Cramer Manuela Veloso Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Pittsburgh Veloso, 53, a professor of computer science and member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, is turning robots from joystick-operated poles on wheels into "CoBots" -- intelligent companions that can navigate and move. "CoBots can accompany you to a particular place, give you a tour, do tasks, or stand in for you as telepresence. It seems like science fiction, but it's not

B.J. was one of many fellow inmates with big plans for the future

01 / Nissan For creating the Leaf, the first mass-market electric car. 02 / Nike > > For its mix of sports, style, and yes, plastic bottles

Amateur chef and comedian Nadia Giosia broke into the competitive world of celebrity cooking with the power of her online community. Nadia Giosia, the saucy Italian comedian behind Cooking Channel's hit show, Bitchin' Kitchen , broke into the elite world of television chefs through the grassroots enthusiasm of her fierce online fans.

Rashmi Sinha seemed destined for a career in academia. Born and raised in India, she earned her Ph.D. in psychology at Brown University and did her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley

Of the many ingredients in his life, business and pleasure are perhaps the two that chef Jos

You've just had a gorgeous restaurant meal: Delicious food, attentive service and an atmosphere that made you feel both indulged and privileged. You already know to tip your server nicely, but what else can you do

High-end restaurants have begun adding a new piece of equipment to the kitchen that until recently was found mainly in medical laboratories and university chemistry departments. The bigger versions look a bit like washing machines, but the spin cycle in these ultracentrifuges is a lot more powerful than that of any Maytag. They whirl vials around tens of thousands of times a minute, generating centrifugal forces up to 30,000 times as strong as Earth’s gravity.

Food safety goes nano, with a new research grant for a U.K. scientist. Future kitchen surfaces could have his spray-on antimicrobial coating

It's not easy to design a home energy monitoring device that people actually want to use and pay for. As evidenced by Tendril's recent decision to nix its IDEO-designed dashboard, not even slick devices that look like they came straight from the Apple store will necessarily make it to market (the $200 price tag was deemed too expensive). Enter EnergyHub , a consumer-facing energy management company that thinks it has a solution to the energy monitoring device quandary