The Four Ages Of Sand

Guest spot: Look at the armour on this!

This great photo of a cricket was taken by Stuart, a friend at the college.

I'm very reluctant to showcase his work because I'm worried it will overshadow my own efforts ;-) but it really does deserve a wider audience, so here goes (just for the record, his camera is a lot bigger than mine, so it's probably much easier to take good pics anyway...)

Click on image for full size

Guest spot: Nick's lovely bird

After Alan's excellent Red Kite photo, here's a lovely photo of a Kestrel taken by Nick, he of An Extra 500 Years of Chocolate fame: (click on image)

Guest Spot: Red Kite

A lovely shot of a Red Kite from Alan T.

These beautiful birds have a wingspan of almost 2 metres and they used to be common in Britain in the 16th Century but were hunted almost to extinction and only a few pairs survived in Wales. The numbers are now increasing and you can often see them flying over motorways; one theory is that motorways attract them because they look like rivers to them. Their triangular tails make them easy to identify:

(click on image)

New Look 4AoS in 2008!

Welcome to new look 2008 blog! As well as new categories - Quote of the Week, Question of the Week, Book reviews - I'll be experimenting with adding video.

Another new feature is the Guest Spot, where contributors send in their own material.

Here's the first submission from NickB. If there is a response from anyone (apart from NickB himself) then we might let him back for further posts later in the year.   

                                             

An extra 500 years of chocolate

   

   

(Click on image)

A recent paper “Chemical and archaeological evidence for the earliest cacao beverages” in PNAS shows that Humans have been enjoying the yummy brown gold since before 1000 BC. That’s 500 years before the previously earliest known consumption of chocolate (”Cacao usage by the earliest Maya civilization”). So let’s hear it for whichever plucky Honduran first thought: “Funny looking beans, I wonder whether …”

It might be a concern that the authors report that “the 10 small, elegant serving vessels” from Puerto Escondido, “all of which yielded evidence of cacao use”. It would have been reassuring to have shown a negative control, some pottery that did not give a signal, just to rule out that the data were due to contamination by the grubby mitts of some poor chocoholic researcher – particularly since some of the team work at Hershey Foods Technical Centre!!

So, does this mean that they have found traces of chocolate that are over 3,000 years old? What are the chances of any chocolate lasting that long?