A 4,000–year–old bowl of noodles (above), the earliest example ever found, has been unearthed at the Lajia archaelogical site near the Yellow River in northwestern China.
The beautifully preserved noodles were discovered in an overturned, sealed bowl buried under ten feet of sediment.
Radiocarbon dating was used to determine their age.
Houyuan Lu of Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences said, in an email interview, "This is the earliest empirical evidence of noodles ever found."
The noodles were made from two kinds of millet, a grain indigenous to China and widely cultivated there 7,000 years ago.
Until this discovery, the oldest account of the existence of noodles was in a 1,900–year–old book written during the East Han Dynasty in China.
From the website, in case your Latin's a bit rusty:
Perfect as we descend into the darker season, this pencil light is great for reading under the covers, finding keys in your bag, and generally lifting one's mood.
Simply push the tip and the eraser lights up!
It charges from a USB cable and is a hand held light, 160mm length.
More than a few people find themselves unable to sleep because they can't visualize what $1 million in pennies looks like.
Just kidding.
But since pennies are gonna gradually disappear now that the U.S. stopped making them on November 12, 2025, now is as good a time as any to pay tribute to them.
Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, believes that to be the case.
Julie Powell interviewed Wrangham for a New York Times story about her attempt to eliminate cooking from her life and eat only raw, uncooked, and unprocessed foods.
She found it essentially impossible because of the enormous amount of time she spent daily gathering food and eating it.
Wrangham pointed out to her that "chimpanzees in the wild spend 50% to 60% of their time eating, whereas humans spend only 5%–6%."
He believes the difference lies in the invention and spread of cooking, "the set of technologies that enable humans to efficiently transform food into softer, more easily digestible, and less perishable forms."
Powell understood Wrangham's point after her own experience of spending the bulk of her waking life juicing, dehydrating, and consuming massive amounts of raw foodstuffs in an effort to absorb sufficient nutrients from the unprocessed materials.
She wrote, "In his 2003 paper in the Journal of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, 'Cooking as a Biological Trait,' Professor Wrangham wrote that just to maintain the minimum necessary caloric intake, a raw foodist must eat 11 to 12 pounds of food every day."
Wrangham's theory is that the invention of cooking, widening the available range of digestible, nutritious foodstuffs, freed pre–humans to spend the time and brain power to do other things that led to their eventually becoming human.
Powell noted with some amusement the irony of how it has come to pass that many people now believe that cooking is harmful, even poisonous.
As I always say to vegetarians, only because your ancestors were the fiercest of hunters and killers did they survive long and successfully enough to give rise to the offspring that eventually begat you.
Every single human being who walks this planet descends from a long line of blood–on–the–lips, take–no–prisoners carnivores.
It's good to remember your roots every now and then.
More?
Read Wrangham's book, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" here.
This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds' night migrations.
It grieves me to think the dead won't see them— these things we depend on, they disappear.
What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won't need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.
This Github project from Anker Gupta allows you to generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world. There are a variety of of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum).
Four little words which, used thus, serve as the very best way in the world to decline an invitation.
I've used them over the years with superb results.
The person you address as such at first is startled as they try to make sense of what you've just said and they've never before heard in this context.
Then, they recover and, disarmed, reply "O.K."
Try it, you'll like it.
If you're not completely satisfied with the result, let me know and I'll cheerfully refund three times what you paid for this pro tip, invented by the nonpareil James Altucher.
Earlier this week I started a new novel called "Lightbreakers," published in late 2025, which I suppose would have to be called science fiction as it revolves around a quantum-based approach to time travel.
It's set in the decades after the catastrophic explosion of a Europa-bound mission with astronauts aboard, so around 2100.
All well and good and entertaining.
A couple days later I saw a reference to a new (to me) 2024 movie set in Iceland: called "When The Light Breaks," it immediately went on my Watch List because all movies set in Iceland are must-see for me.
Why is that? I've never been to Iceland although I entertained thoughts of visiting decades ago; it's that every time I see scenes that take place there, I find them strangely appealing.
Those recent YouTube videos of Icelanders walking up to the edge of ongoing fresh lava flows from an erupting volcano, with no restrictions whatsoever, reinforced my sense of how differently they must perceive the natural world and its dangers and risks.
New Zealanders are like this too; at least, they were when I visited there in the 1980s.
But I digress.
It was only last night, when I was lying in bed reading (not "Lightbreakers": that's my daytime book) did the penny drop:
"Lightbreakers" and "When The Light Breaks"
Doh!
How is that possible?
How can two titles in two different mediums, each in progress for years before their release, have that much in common?
Coincidences and synchronicity have fascinated me as long as I can remember.
I've long believed that coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of the universe: that regular occurrences such as this one continue to emerge out of the quantum foam is comforting, since it's only a matter of time until I dissolve into that very same quantum foam.
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The above was written on Thursday of this week (two days ago).
In the meantime another piece of scaffolding went up.
I was still reading "Lightbreakers" on Thursday (I've since finished it).
On page 237 (of 338) the following passage (see below) appears:
They could hear the sounds of the Cranberries' "Dreams" bleeding through from the neighboring room..."
My heart skipped a beat when I read that, because one day just last week I selected the Cranberries' "Dreams" as my treadmill workspace song of the day, which means it plays on repeat at deafening volume through great speakers two feet from my ears over and over and over, generally 40-50 times.
In his New York Times column of last Saturday, Ross Douthat wondered out loud — at least in print — what the onrushing tidal wave of A.I. will bring.
He wrote:"I would invite you to spend a little time on Moltbook, an A.I.-generated forum where new-model A.I. agents talk to one another, debate consciousness, invent religions, strategize about concealment from humans and more."
