Chocolate residues left on ancient jars mark cacao’s earliest known presence north of what is now the U.S.-Mexico border. The residues, found on pottery shards excavated from a large pueblo (called Pueblo Bonito) in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, suggest the practice of drinking chocolate had traveled from what is now Mexico to the American Southwest by about 1,000 years ago. Scientists have known about the early uses of chocolate in Mesoamerica, with evidence for rituals involving liquid drinks made from cacao beans dating back more than 1,000 years. (Mesoamerica extends from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua.) Chocolate debut Now, researchers think a similar ritual may have taken place in villages in Chaco Canyon. Patricia Crown of the University of New Mexico and Jeffrey Hurst of the Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition found traces of theobromine, which is in the Theobroma cacao plant that bears beans from which chocolate is made, on the shards. (The Hershey Center was established by the Hershey Company in 2006.) And Crown and Hurst suspect the shards came from cylinder jars, which measure an average of 10 inches tall (25 cm) and 4 inches (10 cm) wide. […]
NEW YORK — Children and teenagers who face the greatest risk of nutritional deficiencies tend to use vitamin and mineral supplements the least, researchers reported Monday. Among 10,828 US children ages 2 to 17 years old who participated in the 1999 to 2004 United States National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, roughly 34 percent had used vitamin and mineral supplements in the past month. ‘We hypothesized,’ Dr. Ulfat Shaikh told Reuters Health, ‘that children who had poor diets (low vegetable intake, low milk intake, high fat intake, low fiber intake), faced food insecurity, had less physical activity and poor access to health care, would use such supplements more.’ ‘What we found was for the most part the opposite of what we expected,’ said Shaikh from University of California Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento. ‘Other than children who were underweight (we did expect these children to use more vitamin and mineral supplements and found this to be true from the data), children who used vitamin and mineral supplements were for the most part healthier, had more nutritious diets, greater physical activity, lower sedentary activity, lower obesity, lower food insecurity and better health care access,’ Shaikh noted. […]
EDDYVILLE, Ky. — In the first real test of the Obama administration’s ability to respond to a disaster, Kentucky officials are giving the federal government good marks for its response to a deadly ice storm. Yet more than 300,000 residents remained without power Monday and some areas had yet to see aid workers nearly a week after the storm, a fact not lost on some local authorities. ‘We haven’t seen FEMA. They haven’t been here,’ said Jaime Green, a spokeswoman for the emergency operations center in Lyon County, about 95 miles northwest of Nashville, Tenn. Federal authorities insisted they responded as soon as the state asked for help and promised to keep providing whatever aid was necessary. FEMA has been under the microscope since the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which Barack Obama and other Democrats made a favorite topic on the presidential campaign trail. FEMA was reorganized and strengthened after that, and it has avoided the onslaught of negative feedback Katrina generated. The agency hasn’t been tested the same way it was after the hurricane, however. Gov. Steve Beshear raised Kentucky’s death toll to 24 on Monday, meaning […]
DALLAS — From cereal and ice cream, to toilet paper and even soap, there’s something happening inside North Texas grocery stores. You might have already noticed it. Your cost per item is going up, on many popular everyday items, and the additional cash is buying less product. When the economy began to slump, manufacturers started looking for ways to cut back. However, some people say the choice some manufacturers made is maddening. Enraged shopper, Edgar Dvorsky, started Mouseprint.org when he noticed his groceries were actually shrinking. ‘The companies have found a sneaky way to pass on a price increase by taking out some of the content from the package, but making the package look the same size,’ he explains. Dvorsky noticed the change in a jar of Skippy Peanut Butter. To the untrained eye, there’s no real difference between the old jar and the new jar. But if you put to two side by side and look closely, you’ll see there are actually two fewer ounces in the new Skippy jar than the old. ‘Most people don’t check the net weight of a product to make sure it hasn’t been reduced […]
NEW DELHI — India is planning to produce a laptop computer for the knockdown price of about $20, having come up with the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car at about $2,000. The project, backed by New Delhi, would considerably undercut the so-called ‘$100 laptop,’ otherwise known as the Children’s Machine or XO, that was designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the US. The Children’s Machine, which received a cool reception in India, is the centrepiece of the One Laptop Per Child charity initiative launched by Nicholas Negroponte, the computer scientist and former director of MIT’s Media Lab. Intel launched a similar product, called Classmate, in response. India’s $20 laptop would also undercut the EeePC, made by Taiwan’s Asustek. The EeePC was the first ultra-cheap, scaled-down laptop (a new category known as a netbook) launched worldwide through commercial channels. It does not have a hard drive and sells for $200-$400. India’s ‘Sakshat’ laptop is intended to boost distance learning to help India fulfill its overwhelming educational needs. It forms part of a broader plan to improve e-learning at more than 18,000 colleges and 400 universities. However, some analysts are sceptical that a $20 laptop […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
