Last year, Britain imported 14,000 tons of chocolate covered waffles - and exported 15,000 tons. Doesn't make sense? It's not just bizarre waffle travels; Europeans are importing more food from overseas than ever before, even while exporting things they grow locally and get $60 billion in annual subsidies to produce.

By studying what Europeans eat and from where, scientists hope to understand the economic, political, and cultural impacts of food on European society. One obvious impact of Europeans buying food from outside Europe is that it has greater impact on the environment. For example, as food travels more, it has to be protected with more packaging.

New research at the University of Leicester reveals that plants react to change in light quality in order to develop freezing tolerance. It showed that a reduction in the ratio of red to far-red wavelengths (R:FR) of light increases the expression of freezing tolerance genes in the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana.

The ratio of red to far-red light, which is detected by specialized plant photoreceptors called the phytochromes, is highest in direct sunlight and lower in the shade of vegetation or at twilight, which is prolonged at higher latitudes.

As the giant North American ice sheets melted an enormous pool of freshwater, many times larger than all of the Great Lakes, formed behind them. About 8400 years ago this pool of freshwater burst free and flooded the North Atlantic.

About the same time, a sharp century long cold spell is observed around the North Atlantic and other areas. Researchers have often speculated that the cooling was the result of changes in ocean circulation triggered by this freshwater flood. The sudden addition of so much freshwater would have curtailed (suppressed) the sinking of deep water in the North Atlantic and as a consequence less warm water would be pulled north in the Gulf stream.

New research calls attention to the role of the expanding American waistline in health and medicine.

Researchers at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Sixth Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research presented some of the latest research linking obesity, diabetes and metabolism to cancer risk. Their findings link weight gain and diabetes to a variety of cancers affecting both men and women, including breast, prostate and colorectal cancer

Diabetes and hyper-insulinemia as predictors of colorectal cancer risk in a prospective cohort of women. Abstract no.

Measuring soot formation in a diesel engine is far from easy because the turbulent environment in the combustion cylinder means no two combustion cycles are the same. Furthermore, the measurements are difficult to reproduce as the pressure at which fuel is injected into the cylinder causes an extra source of turbulence.

Bas Bougie, a doctoral candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen created a glass cylinder with an engine so he could investigate soot formation and find ways to optimize diesel performance using laser light.

Laser Induced Incandescence (LII) can be used to investigate optimal engine conditions that reduce soot emission from the engine. LII can be deployed in different types of engines and with different fuels.

Although most scientists believe tuberculosis emerged only several thousand years ago, new research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals the most ancient evidence of the disease has been found in a 500,000-year-old human fossil from Turkey.

The discovery of the new specimen of the human species, Homo erectus, suggests support for the theory that dark-skinned people who migrate northward from low, tropical latitudes produce less vitamin D, which can adversely affect the immune system as well as the skeleton.

John Kappelman, professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin, is part of an international team of researchers from the United States, Turkey and Germany who have published their findings in the Dec.