WASHINGTON - Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, millennia before they developed agriculture.
No matter how you slice it, the discovery detailed on Monday shows that hunter-gatherers in the Eastern Mediterranean achieved the cultural milestone of bread-making far earlier than previously known, more than 4,000 years before plant cultivation took root.
The flatbread, likely unleavened and somewhat resembling pita bread, was fashioned from wild cereals such as barley, einkorn or oats, as well as tubers from an aquatic papyrus relative, that had been ground into flour.
It was made by a culture called the Natufians, who had begun to embrace a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle, and was found at a Black Desert archeological site.
"The presence of bread at a site of this age is exceptional," said Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, a University of Copenhagen postdoctoral researcher in archaeobotany and lead author of the research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
More than half of parents let their kids play over 18s video games, according to the results of a new survey.
Childcare.co.uk surveyed more than 2000 parents in the UK, and found more than half let their children play video games for over 18s without supervision or knowledge of the game beforehand.
The findings won't come as much of a surprise to those familiar with video games and the video game industry. While video games carry age ratings, they're often ignored by parents.
When I worked at GAME in Barnsley in the early 2000s, I was berated by a father after I refused to sell Grand Theft Auto to his 10-year-old son. After pointing out the age rating of the game - and the fact I could have got into quite a lot of trouble for selling the game to his son - the father accused me of trying to tell him how to raise his kid.
It appears parents think of video games in a different way to movies, for example. According to the Childcare.co.uk survey, just 18 per cent of respondents said they would let 10-14-year-olds watch an 18+ movie.
86 per cent of respondents admitted they don't follow age restrictions on video games, whereas 23 per cent said they didn't follow age restrictions on films.
Childcare.co.uk's survey found 43 per cent of parents have seen a negative change in their child's behaviour since playing games aimed at adults, and almost a quarter said their kids now understand and use negative or offensive language since playing these games.
A team from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK analysed and compared the effects of individual characteristics and the economic context on career mobility.
The researchers investigated what is more important for people to change their job - the current unemployment rate, their personal openness to new experiences, their age at the time of the job change, or their level of education.
They found that both individual characteristics and the labour market are factors in career mobility. The results, published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, show that people were more likely to change their organisations, industries, and occupations when they were younger, with the age effect being strongest.
Contrary to the researchers’ initial prediction, people’s openness to new experiences did not play a role in them wanting to change their jobs. However, higher levels of education and a lower unemployment rate were related to changing organisation, but unrelated to going into another occupation.
The results also showed that a good education was more important for employees to change into another industry than a positive situation in the labour market.
In recent decades, employees’ careers have changed significantly, with long-term employment with one organisation no longer the default career path.
A “psychic” octopus that correctly predicted the results of all three of Japan’s soccer World Cup group stage games has been killed and sent to market, just as the knockout stages of the tournament get underway, according to Japanese media.
Rabiot, a giant Pacific octopus caught in Obira, Hokkaido, correctly “predicted” that Japan would win against Colombia, draw with Senegal and a loss to Poland – and it became a national sensation in the process.
Its method involved being placed into a pool with three baskets of food representing Japan winning, Japan’s opponent winning and a draw. Whichever it swam toward first became its prediction.
Local media reported that Kimio Abe, the fisherman who had caught Rabiot, had decided that his business was more important than keeping the “psychic” octopus alive for the knockout stages.
“I hope that the second Rabiot will also give all the outcomes correctly and that Japan will go all the way,” he said, according to Sora News 24.
Unofficially, the 4th January this year was dubbed ‘Fat Cat Thursday’. Granted, it’s not a well-known day, but it was introduced for a sobering reason.
It highlights the fact that by 4th January, only a few days into the new year, some of the world’s highest-paid CEOs had already earned more than an average employee can expect to pocket in an entire working year.
Rising income inequality is getting increasing attention in the developed world and the eye-watering salaries of some corporate CEOs have received regular flak from academics and researchers.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 left a landscape that was highly toxic, but in the 30 years since we've seen small signs of nature recovering. The latest is evidence of a young wild wolf boldly making its way far out of the designated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or CEZ.
Covering some 4,300 square kilometres (1,660 square miles), the zone is still considered too contaminated to be habitable, but some wildlife in the area seems to be flourishing without interference from human activity.
Now those animals are pushing the boundaries of the zone, specifically a young, male grey wolf which has been recorded venturing some 369 kilometres (229 miles) from its home.
That's the first time scientists know of that an animal leaving the zone has covered such a distance, and it could be a sign of how these populations might spread in the future – and how far genes mutated by the nuclear radiation could spread.
"Instead of being an ecological black hole, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone might actually act as a source of wildlife to help other populations in the region," one of the researchers, Michael Byrne from the University of Missouri at Columbia, told Charles Q. Choi at Live...
SEOUL, July 1 (Yonhap) -- Starting this month, South Korean workers will work less than before under a new 52-hour maximum working week devised to ensure work-life balance, observers here said Sunday.
The new change, effective for businesses with more than 300 employees, public institutions and government offices, is expected to bring as big a sea change in everyday life as the five-day-work-week introduced in 2004 did.
Under the new system, Korean workers cannot work over 52 hours per week -- they are allowed 40 hours of regular work and 12 hours of extra work time. If the rules are not followed, a business owner can face up to two years in prison or a fine of up to 20 million won (US$17,945).
Korean businesses have been bracing for the system for the past few months by hiring more workers, overhauling their working hour systems and adopting flexible hours to meet their particular needs.
The Ministry of Labor expects businesses to adopt to the new system without much of a hitch, as many larger Korean big businesses and their subsidiaries have already implemented it.
A survey carried out last month by the ministry on 3,627 businesses with more than 300 workers showed that 59 percent had already enforced the 52-hour maximum workweek.
Cryptocurrency projects have been popping up left, right and center in the past 18 months, but over 800 of those are now dead, adding to comparisons between the current digital coin market and the dotcom bubble in 2000.
New digital tokens are created via a process known as an initial coin offering (ICO) where a start-up can issue a new coin which investors can buy. The investor doesn't get an equity stake in the company, but the cryptocurrency that they buy can be used on the company's product. People usually buy into an ICO because the coins are cheap and could offer big returns in the future.
There has been an explosion in ICOs. Companies raised $3.8 billion via ICOs in 2017, but in 2018 so far, this number has already shot up to $11.9 billion, according to CoinSchedule, a website that tracks the market.
However, hundreds of these projects are now dead because they were scams, a joke or the product hasn't materialized. Dead Coins is a website that lists all the cryptocurrencies that fall into those categories. So far, it has identified just over 800 digital tokens that it considers dead. These coins are worthless and trade at less than 1 cent.
