Goodbye Galileo
Today, the Galileo spacecraft will complete its final task of its eight year long mission to the outer planets. Its final task will commence with a skip across Jupiter's atmosphere, before plunging into the gas giant. Galileo will continue sending data as long as it can. Despite early problems with the spacecraft, Galileo has performed exceedingly well, and it is probably one of NASA's most successful spacecraft. It has sent back a wealth of information that still hasn't been sifted through by researchers yet. Some highlights include its witness of the largest recorded explosion, with a comet plunging into Jupiter; the first picture taken of an asteroid with a moon; many close flybys of the moons of Jupiter, including one where it flew through a volcanic plume. But, like all human made things, it must come to an end ... and today, it's the end for Galileo. (I wonder what Galileo would have thought of his namesake?)
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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