Tagish Lake Meteorite
In January 2000, a 200 ton meteorite exploded into a fireball and rained fragments into the frozen Tagish Lake in the Yukon Territory. The quick recovery and preservation by a nearby resident has lead to a really neat discovery. The recovered fragments contains organic blobs that predates the creation of the solar system, and very closely resembles material that have been created in labs to simulate the conditions when life first appeared on Earth. So where does this leave us with the origin of life question? More questions, and less answers for sure.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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