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Is GM food good or bad? Rather than just debating the question, Britain decided to conduct a large, three-year study. Now they’ve announced that two of the three GM crops grown experimentally, oil seed rape and sugar beet, are more harmful to the environment than conventional crops. Growing these GM crops damages plant and insect life.

The third crop, GM corn, allows the survival of more weeds and insects and therefore may be approved. This was the largest study of GM crops in the world and the results have been a closely guarded secret until now. Paul Brown writes in The Guardian that this will be a major setback to biotech companies that are trying to convince the U.K. and Europe to grow GM crops.
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A team from the University of Uppsala in Sweden says we can stop worrying about greenhouse gases, because in ten years, oil supplies will at disastrously low levels. The world’s oil reserves are 80% less than was predicted earlier. Kjell Alekett says, “Non-fossil fuels must come in much stronger than it had been hoped.” Despite this, the government has just given a huge tax break to businesses that purchase the largest SUVs and trucks?is this because they know that soon, no one will be able to afford to buy enough gas to run them?
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Icelandic researchers have isolated a gene that determines whether we’ll be fat or thin. And a cheap sweetener used in almost everything we eat may play a major role in the obesity epidemic in America.

“Obesity and thinness are two sides of the same coin,” says Kari Stefansson, of deCODE, who helped isolate the gene that determines what shapes our bodies will be. “This is an important step toward developing new drugs that can treat obesity, perhaps by utilizing the body’s own mechanisms for promoting and maintaining thinness.”

If you’ve got the fat version of the gene (and most Americans do), you have to watch what you eat. But what can you do when manmade, fat-producing substances are hiding in almost every food we eat?
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