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?Not the kind that pop up on the internet, asking for your vital statistics, but the kind you dip into tea and eat. There’s now a website devoted to these kinds of cookies (or “biscuits,” as the English call them), that rates which ones taste best.

The site features a “biscuit of the week” and helps people track down their childhood favorites or brands they didn’t think were being made anymore. “Many people think if a supermarket does not carry a biscuit they will not find it anywhere,” says webmaster Stuart Payne, “but what we find is that big supermarkets do not stock what you find in the corner shops.”
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New research shows that the smell of male armpit sweat calms women down. Sniffing a lot of it can alter women’s menstrual cycles, so this discovery could be the start of a line of perspiration-derived contraceptives or fertility drugs. “The underarm contains physiologically active pheromones,” explains chemist George Preti. Pheromones are chemicals that affect the brain and alter our sexual behavior.

Female volunteer were exposed to male armpit odor for six hours, masked by perfume, so they wouldn’t consciously notice the smell, while their levels of luteinizing hormone were monitored. More luteinizing hormone is released from the brain as a woman approaches ovulation, and exposure to male armpit odor accelerated the arrival of the hormone.
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Traces of genetically modified grains are turning up in U.S. wheat, despite the fact that the sale of GM wheat has not been approved here yet. GM soybeans and corn, the two most widely grown genetically modified crops in the world, are getting into wheat supplies that are made into flour that’s used to make bread and other foods.

When U.S. wheat has been tested recently at Rank Hovis, the largest miller in the U.K. and an importer of U.S. wheat, traces of GM soybeans and corn particles were found mixed in with it. Director Peter Jones says, “We routinely find (soy)beans and (corn) and we must accept that these are genetically modified.” The U.K. is one of the countries that refuses to import GM foods.
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The smoke in the atmosphere is protecting the Earth from the effects of global warming. This means that as we send out less pollution in the future, we may find that global warming is two or even three times more than we predicted.

Top atmospheric scientists got together recently in Berlin for a meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scientists have suspected for a long time that smoke and other particles from burning rainforests, crops and fossil fuels are blocking the sunlight and protecting us from the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions. They used to think pollution was reducing greenhouse warming by a quarter, but at the Berlin meeting, they decided it’s really reducing warming by as much as three-quarters. read more