National Geographic - Jan. 2003
I've only recently started to pick up the National Geographic magazine. It's a whole lot of what I remembered it to be, and a whole lot more - maybe that was always there, and I just don't remember. What I find different now in the magazine is additional science articles - not just a focus on exploration. National Geographic doesn't reprint their magazine articles on the web. What they do however is have complimentary information posted on their site. Lots of related links, etc., for deeper exploration. Here are the notable articles from the Jan. 2003 issue:
Chasing the Great Wall: a very well written article on today's China, the people and the great Wall. It makes for a very interesting and real, read.
Dreamweavers: an article about the textiles of tomorrow. They're still on the drawing board, but tomorrow textiles could take humans to outer space, make soldiers invisible, keep you in touch with friends and, cool rivaling invisibility - move buildings!
Japan's Winter WIldlife: the reason to get the National Geographic has always been the pictures, and this article on the winter wildlife in Japan is chock full of pretty pictures. Check out the swans, cranes, and my favourite, the snow monkeys.
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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