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

When you take your computer or cell phone back to the store to be "recycled," do you have any idea what actually happens to it?

Ethonomic Indicator of the Day: 7 -- The number of IQ points that children exposed to pesticides in utero fell behind other children. From the department of "science proves the obvious": exposure to neurotoxic pesticides in the womb results in children with lower IQs, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley

Monsanto, enemy of organic farmers and anti-GMO advocates alike, will now be allowed to conduct its own environmental studies as part of a two-year USDA experiment. But there is no good that can possibly come of an experiment where the company behind nearly every genetically modified crop in our daily diets is allowed to decide whether its products are causing any environmental harm.

It's only taken half a century or so, but the American public has finally realized and come to accept that inhaling additive-laden smoke--first or second-hand (or third-hand , even)--isn't the healthiest thing in the world. So over the past 10 years, 25 states and Washington, D.C. have implemented smoking bans in private sector worksites, restaurants, and bars

So you're driving down the highway in your brand new Nissan Leaf EV, thinking about how you're so environmentally responsible, and all of a sudden you realize that you might run out of power before reaching your destination. This scenario is still a rare one, granted, but gas prices are shooting up (just wait until $6 per gallon gas in the U.S., coming to a station near you this summer).

Gas prices are creeping upward, climate change is slowly causing the number of dangerous weather events to increase, and we still don't have a definitive solution to preventing a future where we are all forced to live in flood-proof, solar-powered bomb shelters.

While cities like San Francisco are awash in boutique bread shops and dirt-cheap farmer's markets, others (like Detroit) don't even have supermarkets. These so-called food deserts typically offer mostly standard corner-store fare like Jell-O, Ritz Bitz, or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. So it's strange that Triscuit, another--albeit slightly healthier-tasting Kraft product--is now making a play to be associated with anti-food desert urban gardening projects

A new study from the John Muir Trust--not the sorts who would attack wind farms just for the fun of it--debunks five important industry claims. As interest in renewable energy grows, wind power companies are rushing to build giant installations; it sometimes seems that a new "biggest wind farm ever" arrives every month (the most recent one is in Germany, to replace all their scary nuclear power). But wind farms of all sizes may not produce as much energy as advertised, according to a new report ( PDF ) from the John Muir Trust.

Nobody goes to McDonald's in the U.S. expecting to buy chicken nuggets made out of healthy, fairly-treated chickens; they just want crunchy nuggets, no questions asked.

Next year, U.S. electronics companies will be required by law to disclose and trace their use of conflict minerals (gold, tungsten, tantalum, and tin deposits that fund war in Central Africa). Instead of waiting to be attacked by human rights groups, Apple and Intel, and other companies involved in the Conflict-Free Smelter program opted to avoid embarrassment and ditch the minerals altogether--and the decision is causing some problems.