Want to avoid overspending on Black Friday? An amino acid you ingest in Thanksgiving dinners with lots of carbs and turkey could help you fight off that urge to impulse buy, according to a study by two researchers from the University of Utah's School of Business.

Aril Mishra and Himanshu Mishra suspect that the effect is chemical. Turkey and other traditional Thanksgiving foods contain the amino acid tryptophan, which increases the levels of serotonin in the brain.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which aids the passage of messages through the brain, influencing many functions including sleep, memory, learning, sex drive, mood, and appetite. The body uses trytophan to make serotonin.

In the world of advertising, the Tropicana disaster of 2008-09 is already legendary.

The orange juice container redesign by controversial brand guru Peter Arnell eliminated the familiar straw-in-an-orange image in favor of a photo of a glass of OJ. This killed the brand recognition developed over many years, resulting in a 20% drop in sales and the loss of millions of dollars within two months. Tropicana beat a hasty retreat to the old design.

Now, according to Advertising Age, Coca-Cola is taking a similar risky step, re-branding its Minute Maid line of juices. The company wants to eventually harmonize the images surrounding the brand and the others it owns, including Del Valle, Andina and Cappy.

The new orange juice design features whole oranges, slices, and leaves to suggest the groves from which it comes. As you'll see from the pictures above, the new packaging has more green, and the blue is gone. I like it.

The holiday season is full of parties, travel and gift-giving. According to noted security expert Chris E. McGoey, AKA the Crime Doctor, these same joys can also make your home a more alluring target for burglars.

Fortunately, he has suggestions on how you can minimize the risk.

How is the risk of burglary increased during the holidays?

• Many of you will have carpet cleaners and other strangers in to help spruce up the house for the holidays.
• You or you children may be hosting parties attended by people you only casually know.
• Many of you will travel overnight, leaving your home vacant.
• You'll be piling new, alluring presents under the tree, and burglars like presents, too.
• Schools will be on holiday, leaving teens with lots of free time.
• December nights are the longest of the year.
• The UPS and FedEx people may be delivering boxes of goodies to your door.
• You may be hosting overnight guests unfamiliar with your security system.

The largest wine scam in the history of the United States was partly resolved this week with Mark Anderson's plea of guilty to numerous counts associated with torching a wine storage facility in the San Francisco area in 2005 to cover the tracks of his wholesale theft.

The blaze destroyed 6 million bottles of top-drawer wines worth an estimated quarter of a billion dollars.

Free range cash has several drawbacks. For the user, carrying a wad of cash can be hazardous; for banks, cash is cumbersome and offers no opportunity to charge interest; to the merchant, paying cash turns buyers annoyingly frugal; for the government, cash greases illicit business operations.

Credit and debit cards are better, but still require a physical item that can be stolen, scratched or altered.

In a digital age, therefore, you should expect a digital solution to transactions, and it looks like it might come in the form of the cell phone.

According to Folio magazine, the Internet microblogging site Twitter is in consideration to be named Time Magazine's Person of the Year (yeah, I think the idea is silly too).

However, the magazine's timing could be poor, as Mashable.com has pointed out that Twitter visitor numbers have plateaued and even declined slightly in the past five months. The site hit 23,579,044 unique visitors in August. By October, this number had dropped by over half a million.

In our homeland of the obese, the lunch and dinner business is saturated, so fast food retailers are looking to the breakfast market to make better use of their retail locations.

I wonder, however, about the prospects of Subway as it attempts to grow its share of that market. Where are the ads, I wonder, for $5 foot-long omelets?

Breakfast is a fickle market. Wendy's, the third largest burger chain in the country, recently crapped out in its second foray into this market.

Subway, according to Advertising Age, is jousting with already established breakfast retailers such as McDonald's, and others attempting to redefine themselves with wider a.m. menu selections (Dunkin' Donuts.)

The town of Goshen, Indiana was named one of CNNMoney's best places to live in 2008, and the Maple City Health Care Clinic may have played a role in that distinction.

The clinic, a not-for-profit community initiative, has an innovative program that allows the poorest of its patients to pay off their medical tab by doing volunteer work.

Sleepy in the morning but too rushed for a cup of coffee? How about caffeinating yourself as you shower? Here's our take on Shower Shock, the caffeine soap from thinkgeek.com.

Say hello to the spawn of Snuggie: The Dreamie. This person-pocket sleeping bag is the latest branch in a family tree of products that cost virtually nothing to make and depend heavily on adjectives and money-back guarantees to sell.

The Dreamie is essentially what we used to call a sleep sack when we spent nights in youth hostels. Take two small sheets, sew the sides and bottom together, fold over the top of one sheet a pillow's length and sew it on both side to form a pocket, and you have a Dreamie. The unspecified fabric is described as silky, which I'd guess is ad-speak for polyester. (There's also the option to upgrade to fleece.)