Earth's Shifting Magnetic Field
Earth's north pole has been known to be moving ever since the first expeditions located it. In the 20th century, it moved an average of 10km per year, but lately, it's been accelerating to about 40km per year. At this rate, it's predicted to leave Canada and enter Siberia in the coming decades. Not only that, but in the last 100 years, the magnetic field strength has weakened about 10%. Time to sound the alarm? Probably not. Earth is pretty dynamic, and the magnetic field has been known to do lots of crazy things -- it won't stop the doomsayers though! To see some computer simulations of the Earth's magnetic field, click here, and here, and here!
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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