Nanotech 2004
A big show about itty-bitty things. The Nanotech conference and trade show is being held in Boston, on March 7-11 -- and I wish I was there to see all the cool small stuff, and listed to the latest of small things will change the world. There's lots of interesting science, but not a lot of content on the site. You can find abstracts of some of the talks, but for further details, you have to either attend the conference, or go to the individual presenters sites for more on what they're working on.
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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