US scrutiny of foreign students
From MIT's Technology Review, comes concern that the increased levels of scrutiny, delays and just plain scare tactics that are now greeting foreign students entering the US from predominantly Muslim countries, may shift where foreign students seek their post-secondary education. A lot of scientists in the US entered the country via the foreign student route, got their education and decided to stay to exploit the benefits of their education in the US' free market economy. Who doesn't want to live the American dream? But since 9/11, the US policy to foreign students has become increasingly xenophobic. Eventually, this could lead to US institutions having less of an impact to science and technology. Read the related article, Technological McCarthyism, as well.
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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