Borneo's Forests
Every year, an area half the size of Switzerland is felled in Borneo. Once the trees are gone, the animals that found shelter there go with them -- wild orangutans, sun bears and clouded leopards -- all of which could be extinct in 10-20 years. What happens when there are no more trees? Unemployment for the loggers that are today chopping down the trees. But there is hope. With help from environmental groups, logging companies are trying their hand at environmental ways of harvesting the forest without raping it. Why the sudden change? And who gives 2-cents about another third world country that is being taken advantage of? Believe it or not, big western retailers -- that's who. Big western retailers that are scared that their consumers my boycott their products if they are the result of third world pillaging. Go figure -- a little protest goes a long way. Hopefully, it's not too late. Read the article in BusinessWeek.
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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