lsanderson | Chocolate and Earwax...

Masters of Chocolate Look Abroad and See Something Even Richer
By JOHN TAGLIABUE

BRUSSELS — Every three weeks, a FedEx flight departs Zaventem Airport on the edge of Brussels carrying Michel Boey's products to the United States. Call it the chocolate bomber.

Mr. Boey is part of a new crop of Belgian chocolate makers that has sprung up after many of the big names were swallowed decades ago by multinational food giants. One of the last to go was Godiva, which caused Belgians to shudder when it was acquired in 1974 by the Campbell Soup Company.

Mr. Boey, 49, a former banker, took over Mary Chocolaterie, a family-run chocolate maker, in 1998. Since then, sales have grown so vigorously that he is shipping his chocolates to the United States and Japan from his shop along Rue Royale, which looks like a grandmother's parlor with its mix of period furnishings and comfortable armchairs.

"It is exactly as in wine," he said, receiving a visitor amid heavy aromas of dark chocolate. "Once, wine was wine. Now we appreciate smaller quantities, but the quality is better."

For the Belgians, who know their ganache from their gianduja, and relish the difference, names like Mr. Boey's have become household words. And now they are stretching their palates to create new chocolate recipes, and looking abroad, above all in the United States, to find connoisseurs for them. More

OK, so it's not in the same article...

Scientists Find Gene That Controls Type of Earwax in People
By NICHOLAS WADE

Earwax may not play a prominent part in human history but at least a small role for it has now been found by a team of Japanese researchers.

Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of people have it, and the dry form among East Asians. The populations of South and Central Asia are roughly half and half. By comparing the DNA of Japanese with each type, the researchers were able to identify the gene that controls which type a person has, they report in today's issue of Nature Genetics.

They then found that the switch of a single DNA unit in the gene determines whether a person has wet or dry earwax. The gene's role seems to be to export substances out of the cells that secrete earwax. The single DNA change deactivates the gene and, without its contribution, a person has dry earwax.

The Japanese researchers, led by Kohichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University, then studied the gene in 33 ethnic groups around the world. Since the wet form is so common in Africa and in Europe, this was likely to have been the ancestral form before modern humans left Africa 50,000 years ago. More