Call it the Davos of nose, the olfactory Olympics, the Sundance of Scent. On June 5, representatives of more than 50 top fragrance-and-flavor companies will converge at the World Perfumery Congress in Cannes, France, to charm potential customers and herald their latest innovations. Gilles Andrier, CEO of Givaudan, the industry leader, will speak on "The Noses of Tomorrow." The latest robotic smell mixers will be on display. International Flavors and Fragrances , Givaudan's closest rival, will fly in most of ...

"Sushi tastes amazing. A great steak is just amazing." Those are not the words you expect to hear from a leader of the vegetarian movement. But that's how Graham Hill, founder of the sustainability website TreeHugger, feels about the fleshier components of his diet. He is a self-described "weekday vegetarian," a compromise that came about after years of trying--and failing--to adhere to a strictly vegetarian diet. For the past year, Hill has preached the cause of partial vegetarianism to help ...

James Phung saw Phone Booth before you did. What's more, he saw it for free, in the comfort of his private home-screening room. Phung isn't a movie star or a Hollywood insider; he's a junior at the University of Texas who makes $8 an hour at the campus computer lab. But many big-budget Hollywood movies have their North American premieres in his humble off-campus apartment. Like millions of other people, Phung downloads movies for ...

As a gubernatorial candidate last summer, Georgia Republican Nathan Deal boasted of having backed measures to bar undocumented immigrants from federal health care, and public colleges. He supported a bill that, starting July 1, will become one of America's most punitive state immigration laws. And now he has released a report indicating that Georgia's largest industry, agriculture, suddenly has 11,000 openings — which, he suggested, should be filled with some of the state's 100,000 ex-convicts, about ...

If the Three Mile Island atomic reactor near Harrisburg hadn't melted down 30 years ago this Saturday...well, there probably would have been an accident somewhere else. The entire U.S. nuclear industry was melting down in the 1970s, irradiated by spectacular cost overruns, interminable delays and public outrage. Forbes later called its collapse "the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale." The TMI fiasco was a scary cultural moment, coming just two weeks after ...

As a 19-year-old philosophy student in Paris, Jens Martin Skibsted had a watershed moment when the bicycle protest against cars he was riding in came to a sudden halt. The roadblock? A motorcycle demonstration. "I realized the absurdity of it," says the Danish entrepreneur, who turns 40 this year. "People are not going to change because an activist goes around shouting." So Skibsted took a different route. Instead of telling people they should get out of their cars, why not make ...

Leonard Lauder, chief executive of the company his mother founded, says she always thought she "was growing a nice little business." And that it is. A little business that controls 45% of the cosmetics market in U.S. department stores. A little business that sells in 118 countries and last year grew to be $3.6 billion big in sales. The Lauder family's shares are worth more than $6 billion. But early on, there wasn't a burgeoning business, there weren't houses in ...

It's only natural, I suppose, for a $625 five-volume, epochal publishing event like Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to polarize the food world. After all, this is the book the whole culinary world has been waiting for: "the cookbook to end all cookbooks," as David Chang called it. I witnessed Myhrvold's impatience with old-fashioned ways of thinking when I visited the eccentric millionaire last fall, and so last week's dustup with superstar food writer Michael Ruhlman wasn't unexpected. ...

After first sending Spain's agricultural industry into a tailspin by falsely accusing that country's cucumbers, German authorities on June 5 pointed a finger of blame at local beansprouts — specifically the produce of an organic farm in the village of Bienenbttel, around 70 kilometers south of Hamburg — as the source of an outbreak of deadly E. Coli infections. But the next day, the Ministry of Agriculture of Lower Saxony, which includes Hamburg and Bienenbttel, declared that ...

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the few sectors around that appears to be weathering these difficult times with relative ease. On Friday the European Commission suggested why that might be: it claims Big Pharma systematically rigged the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. By using patent lawsuits and other delaying tactics to prevent cheaper generic medicines from entering the market, the drug majors cost European consumers up to $4 billion over an eight-year period until 2007, ...