Greenhouses on Mars
NASA is researching the effects of growing plants on Mars -- as any base there would be required to be as self-sufficient as possible. Problem is however, plants have evolved to adapt to the environment on Earth, not Mars, and they start to act strangely when experimented under Mars-like conditions. Low pressure for example -- Mars has lower pressure than Earth -- plants don't like that -- they start to act as if they're drying out. Interestingly enough, this research has applications on Earth. Read a very cool article.
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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