Is salt bad for you or not?
The honest answer is that we just don’t know:
[T]here’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to.
There is evidence to suggest that reducing salt in a diet can cause one’s blood pressure to drop. But despite increasing average food consumption on the part of Americans, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest our salt consumption is remaining consistent.
Have we found the beginning of civilization?
In southeastern Turkey, archeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered the remains of a temple that seemingly defies what science has long believed about the origins of civilization:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Scmidt believes that the urge to worship acted as a spark to bring mankind together — that support for religion created civilization (via).
Why do Canadians play hockey left-handed?
If you watch this week’s Olympic hockey competition, you might notice a strange trend. Americans, at every level of the sport, have a higher tendency to use right-handed sticks, while their Canadian counterparts have a higher tendency to use left-handed sticks.
No one knows exactly why that is:
Most Canadians, like most Americans, are naturally right-handed, so the discrepancy has nothing to do with national brain-wiring. And how you hold a pencil, say, has little or no bearing on how you hold a stick. A left-handed shooter puts his right hand on top; a right-hander puts the left hand there.
The trend even carries over to golf, where at least 7 percent of Canadian players play left-handed.
Does your face reveal your political party?
Researchers at Tufts University recently conducted a study where undergraduate students were shown pictures of the faces of candidates for the US Senate from 2004 and 2006. After seeing the images, students were asked to identify the candidates’ political parties:
The result? They found that the students’ guesses were much better than chance. They also found that the students were good at guessing the political party affiliation of other students based on pictures of their faces.
Turns out, GOP faces tended to score more highly for ‘power’ while Democratic faces scored more highly for ‘warmth.’
When did man go to sea?
Archaeologists generally believe that the oldest evidence for seafaring migration is the existence of human remains on Australia that date back to 60,000 years ago. But a discovery at a dig on the Greek island of Crete may force scientists to reassess what we about the maritime capabilities of our species:
Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.
The hand axes on the island might be as much as 700,000 years old, though researchers estimate they are in fact considerably more recent.
How do you choose (and use) a knife?
Tom Mylan is a butcher, and he knows a thing or two about knives:
There are two rather long, parallel calluses on the palm of my right hand where my knife of choice, a five-inch Forschner, sits nearly every day for about 10 hours. I don’t cut myself much these days, except with sharp objects that aren’t knives (the Japanese-style mandolin is a particularly potent nemesis of mine, shaving off a good chunk of my thumb nearly every time I forget why I stopped using one in the first place). But my ability to keep out of harms way has been hard-won. What follows is a primer on what I’ve learned about knives and their proper (and improper) use.
For his knives, Mylan chooses inexpensive, wood-handled stainless steel. All those who use knives, he says, will eventually cut themselves.
(via)
What will we drive in the future?
Is there an ocean on Enceladus?
The Cassini probe has discovered yet more evidence that a significant body of water exists on one of Saturn’s moons. In its latest sweep by the moon, the probe detected negatively charged water ions in the Enceladian atmosphere.
On Earth, those molecules are found near places where water crashes — near waves or waterfalls:
There are no “rollers” on the moon but it does have a very active region near its south pole where water vapour and ice particles shoot through cracks in the surface and rise high into the Enceladian sky.
Cassini was launched on October 15, 1997. In 2008, NASA received funding to extend the probe’s mission through 2017.
