Photo: Food52

For those moments this season when your smartphone isn't either blaring Christmas carols or streaming videos of a calming ocean, these five apps will help you be a little more productive.

FOOD52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, $9.99 for iPad.
This app, spun off of the crowd-sourced site Food52, has 75 recipes for Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's, 100 minutes of video tutorials, plus extras like step-by-step photos of zesting, peeling and segmenting citrus; rules for reheating food; and a dish-washing game plan.

Baking with Dorie, $7.99 for iPad.
Cookbook author Dorie Greenspan gives more than 20 baking lessons via 100-plus videos in this app that's as useful as it is beautiful to look at. Learn how to make Dorie's All-in-One Holiday Bundt Cake (with pumpkin, cranberries, pecans and a maple syrup icing), Cinnamon Squares and more cold-weather treats.

Grocery iQ, free for Android, iPhone and iPad.
This app lets you build your food shopping list quickly by scanning the barcode for any product, or via predictive text (and its database contains millions of food items). You can create lists for multiple stores, sort your list by aisle, and find coupons for items you're shopping for.

Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.

Photo: Ben Goldstein/Studio D

* America's favorite doctor has plenty of colorful, comforting gift ideas. (O Magazine).

* Guys who love My Little Pony have a name: Bronies. They also have a convention, where they can geek out with adoration for Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy. (WSJ.com)

* From Jay Z to Novak Djokovic to . . . Kristen Wiig? GQ's Men of the Year. (GQ)

* It isn't easy looking stylish next to Kermit's signature green. Jim Henson pulls it off, and your man can too. (Nerd Boyfriend)

* "And then there were the everyday, every-stripe Americans. Like a tattooed trucker I met off I-80 in Iowa who, when he heard how many African truck drivers were infected with H.I.V., told me he’d go and drive the pills there himself."—On World AIDS Day, Bono finds reasons to be hopeful about the future of our fight against the pandemic. (NYTimes.com)

Photo: Thinkstock

You've probably heard of bisphenol-A, or BPA -- it's the industrial chemical found in clear, sturdy plastics and PVC, and it's been linked to higher risks of cancer, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. It's the reason you switched from a plastic water bottle to a BPA-free stainless steel one, and why you stopped microwaving your leftovers in plastic take-out containers. And though most of the focus has been on plastic bottles, BPA also exists in the lining of canned foods.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association may change the way we look at those canned goods. The study found that those who ate just one serving of canned soup for five days showed increases in their BPA levels by over a thousand percent. The Harvard researchers told the New York Times they were stunned by the results.

So are we, especially because we've been really enjoying chicken soup season so far. But don't despair: while it's hard to find BPA-free cans (manufacturers like it because this type of lining prevents corrosion and is resistant to extreme heat), you have options:

• Make your own soup using one of these classic recipes: Chicken noodle, chicken and rice, broccoli leek, classic clam chowder. Store in containers made from glass, porcelain and stainless steel, and bring lunch portions to work in a Mason jar. 
• Look for soups that are packaged in Tetra Pak paper boxes with a BPA-free liner. 
• Switch to frozen (or fresh) vegetables.
• Cut back on your canned soup habit (you'll avoid sodium as well as BPA). 
• Develop a taste for miso soup that comes in paper envelopes.