The BBC News Magazine writes that an experiment conducted by the television program Trust Me, I’m a Doctor suggests reheating pasta can greatly reduce the rise in blood glucose.
University of Surrey scientist Dr. Denise Robertson explained how cooked pasta that had been cooled down would be treated similar to fiber, resulting in fewer calories absorbed, a smaller peak in blood glucose, while providing greater nourishment for helpful gut bacteria.
It was not known what happens when you reheat pasta.
But it was suspected that reheating the pasta would negate such healthful benefits. So Dr Chris van Tulleken of Trust Me, I’m a Doctor decided to find out. He was surprised to learn the opposite appears true.
Cooling cooked pasta and then reheating it seems to convert the pasta to an even more “resistant starch” that digests more slowly, and in their one experiment with several volunteers, blood glucose levels were notably lower than eating cooled pasta, and 50% lower than eating pasta that had never been cooled.
As a result of the experiment, Diabetes UK will fund further research by Dr. Robertson into whether resistant starch like reheated pasta could improve blood test results associated with Diabetes.
Trust Me, I’m a Doctor tests common health claims and concerns about things like probiotics, vitamin C, plastic water bottles, and emergency first aid treatments.
Monday Map – Ancient Macedonia and its principalities, about 100 years after the death of Alexander the Great
click to enlarge
In French, but the best map I could find of ancient Macedonia showing Amphipolis, site of the recent revelations at the massive Kasta tomb from the time of Alexander. It is the largest found in Greece.
This homeland of the legendary conqueror Alexander the Great was but a small portion of his empire, which reached all the way to India. This map also shows Rhodes, at the bottom right, from whence came the famous architect Dinocrates, thought to have designed the mega-tomb still being excavated in what is now Northeast Greece.
Also shown is the island of Samos, part of the Greek colonies of Ionia, off the coast of modern day Turkey. It was here that Science was invented by great thinkers like Aristarchus of Samos, who, about about the same time this map represents, offered the earliest known proposition that the planets revolved around the sun and that that the stars were other suns much farther away.
Free from the scrutiny of the authorities far off on the Greek mainland, the scientists of Ionia were free thinkers and developed what we now call the Scientific Method.
Unfortunately, most of their findings and theories were suppressed or disbelieved and the Scientific Method had to wait some centuries more before it was rediscovered, first in Egypt just before the Roman occupation, and then again after the Dark Ages.
For more on the amazing discoveries at the Kasta tomb from ancient Macedonia, please see the following post.
The god Hermes leads the chariot of a bearded man wearing laurels toward the underworld, in a stunning mosaic revealed by the Greek Ministry of Culture, recently discovered at the massive 4th Century BC tomb at Amphipolis in Northeast Greece.
source: Greek Ministry of Culture
The moasic floor was made with pebbles of six different colors, and were enough found in the chamber that archeologists hope to reconstruct the damaged portions before the tomb is opened to public sometime in the future. Almost 15 x 10 feet in size, the mosaic covers the entire floor of the tomb’s second chamber.
Known as the Kasta tomb (Τύμβος Καστάv,) the site has been under careful excavation since its discovery in 2012. It is the largest tomb ever found in Greece at 1,935ft (590m) in width.
Amphipolis was a major navel port during the reign of Alexander the Great. Three of the tomb’s four known chambers have been entered thus far, and it is assumed to have been built for one of Alexander’s close relatives, and possibly his wife.
Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, a month before his 33rd birthday. His tomb is said to be in Egypt, but it has never been found. It is possible the site in Amphipolis is actually a cenotaph, a monument to someone buried elsewhere. The many features revealed by archeologists thus far suggest the work of Alexander’s chief architect Dinocrates of Rhodes.
So, it is possible the site is actually an unoccupied monument to Alexander himself, or his father, Philip II, who conquered the region a generation earlier. Before then Amphipolis had been an independent city state, famous for defeating an Athenian invasion some 80 years before it fell before King Philip.
While a recently discovered hole in an inner wall implies it may have been looted in antiquity, it is still hoped they may know for certain just who it was built for, once they enter the fourth chamber. But the site dwarfs Philip’s own tomb in ancient Aigai some 100 kilometers west of Amphipolis. That is but one reason this site is of so much interest.
Other important discoveries at the site include two large sphinxes and even larger caryatids, and recent photos of both can be seen at various websites.
Around the web – a 24-year-old Scottish woman returned from a trip to Southeast Asia suffering nosebleeds, which she assumed were related to an accident.
As Daniela Liverani told a Scottish newspaper, “Two weeks before I came home from Asia, I started having nosebleeds but I’d fallen off a motorbike so thought I’d burst a blood vessel.
“After I got home, the nosebleeds stopped and I started seeing something sticking out of my nostril. I just thought it was congealed blood from the nosebleeds.
“I tried to blow him out and grab him but I couldn’t get a grip of him before he retreated back up my nose.
“When I was in the shower, he would come right out as far as my bottom lip and I could see him sticking out the bottom of my nose.
“So when that happened, I jumped out of the shower to look really closely in the mirror and I saw ridges on him. That’s when I realised he was an animal.”
Ms. Liverani, praised the calmness and concern of the doctors at the Edinburgh hospital who took a painful 30 minutes to remove the parasite, which she dubbed “Mr. Curly” before boiling the creature and throwing it away.
One leech expert suggested the parasite could have entered the woman’s nose while she was swimming, or simply by having a drink of water. Hard to imagine not feeling something so large entering the nose or mouth, but I guess leeches have had a lot of practice at such stealthy maneuvers.
Suddenly my life as a Brooklyn mosquito magnet doesn’t seem all that bad.
Reading related to the Backpacker finds three-inch leech up her nose
Monday Map showing how the name of European nations, when translated literally from Chinese, according to Haohao Report, can be rather amusing.
click to enlarge
What’s In A Name?
Some leeway has been taken here, since certain Chinese characters can have more than one meaning, depending upon usage and dialect. Also, when naming countries for maps, the Chinese would often choose characters that sounded close to the syllables used to pronounce the official name of the country in question. For example the official name of Spain is España, which in Chinese became Xi Ban Ya, or “West Class Tooth.”
This brought to mind a question I have posed for many years, why don’t we call Germany Deutschland and a German Deutsch?
A German by any other name would be as Deutsch
I know why we call Germany Germany; it comes from the Latin germanicus, which was used to describe the tribes in that part of the world during the Roman Empire.
That is not a very satisfying answer, considering we have had a thousand years to figure out what a place is actually called. It has been 200 years since Deutsch was offered to the world as the official term of national identification. But we keep right on with this German nonsense.
Sometime around Nixon’s visit to China we were suddenly asked to start calling Peking by its more accurate pronunciation of Beijing. In less than 20 years it became second nature to use the correct name. Why can’t we do the same with Deutschland? After all, we call Finland Finland.
But then, its name isn’t Finland, is it? It is Suomi.
It just seems arrogant to me, or at least rather lazy in this information age to expect a Svenska person from Sverige to come to America and continually say “I am Swedish from Sweden.”
I understand that certain languages make it rather difficult to master the actual name of well-known countries. But many of the names we use are no less absurd than those on the map above. However, if we followed the Peking to Beijing model, with schoolchildren taught the proper names at an early age, reenforced by the New York Times and other sources of record, it probably wouldn’t take all that long to adjust to calling our friends and neighbors on the planet by their actual names, instead of “You from that place I don’t know how to pronounce.”
Here are the names of European lands, according to themselves. Some use symbols and characters we do not. Sometimes their spelling actually sounds like ours. But in many cases we come nowhere near the mark.
English Name – Local Name (different alphabet) [pronunciation]
Albania – Shqipëria [Ship-per-EE-ya ]
Andorra – Andorra
Austria – Österreich
Azerbaijan – Azərbaycan
Belarus – Biełaruś
Belgium – België
Bosnia and Herzegovina – Bosna i Hercegovina
Bulgaria – Bŭlgarija
Croatia – Hrvatska
Czech Republic – Česko
Denmark – Danmark
England – England
Estonia – Eesti
Finland – Suomi
France – France
Germany – Deutschland
Greece – (Elláda)
Hungary – Magyarország
Iceland – Ísland
Ireland – Éire
Italy – Italia
Latvia – Latvija
Liechtenstein – Liechtenstein
Lithuania – Lietuva
Luxemburg – Luxembourg
Macedonia – (Makedonija)
Moldova – (Moldova)
Monaco – Monaco
Montenegro – (Crna Gora)
Netherlands – Nederland
Norway – Norge
Poland – Polska
Portugal – Portugal
Romania – România
Russia – (Rossiya)
San Marino – San Marino
Serbia – (Srbija)
Scotland – Scotland – the Scots name, Alba is the Gaelic term
Slovakia – Slovensko
Slovenia – Slovenija
Spain – España
Sweden – Sverige
Switzerland – Helvetica – official name that avoids favoring one language over others.
What became of the soldiers from the Great War who left behind the mysterious wishbones of McSorley’s Ale House?
According to the story on Atlas Obscura, there remain to this day, hanging over the bar at McSorley’s, wishbones placed there by servicemen as good luck charms prior to their being shipped overseas in 1917. Just one example of the amazing bits of history to be found at 15 East 7th Street in New York’s East Village, where McSorley’s Ale House opened in 1857.
The last American veteran of the First World War was named Frank Buckles, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 110. He had been a 16 year old motorcycle driver “over there,” and in the 1940s he survived a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines during the Second World War, where he contracted the beriberi that continued to trouble him the rest of his life.
As we have now crossed the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War, more attention has been brought to those who took part in what sadly failed to end all wars, as was predicted. They are all gone now, like the veterans of the American Civil War before them.
But what of the wishbone hangers? Some of the men came back to remove a wishbone and celebrate their safe return to McSolrey’s bar. What became of the others, whose wishbones remain there to this day, a silent reminder from the Lost Generation?
Did they not make it back to New York, or to McSorley’s? Or did they not make it back at all?
When next at the bar and ordering your mugs of light or dark, be sure and look for the wishbones and toast those warriors whose fate is now shrouded in history as well as mystery.
An early world map, known as the Secunda etas Mundi, shows how the mythos and fantastical thinking of the medieval mind dominated still, a year after Columbus.
As our Monday Maps series gets back up to speed, I thought it would be nice to visit an old timer.
This is a color rendition of the “Secunda etas Mundi” that appeared in the World Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum) by Hartmann Schedel. Published in 1493, this was the first major book published since the invention of the printing press to get the same kind of ornate illustrations that had previously been reserved for the Bible and related texts.
Clearly based on Ptolemy‘s view of the world that had been lost during the Middle Ages and very much became a centerpiece of classical influence upon the Renaissance thinkers. So this map omits the new world and the southern tip of Africa, which were both reached before the map was made, and it shows terra incognita all along the southern portion of the Indian Ocean.
To the left are the sort of mythical beings expected to be found in the exotic locales represented. And around the map are seen the prevailing winds and the sons of Noah, believed to have populated the world after the great flood.
No wonder it took so long to get anywhere with this kind of GPS to go by!
NASA’s Maven has arrived at Mars and has safely settled into orbit
Now begins its mission of investigating the high atmosphere of the red planet, in hopes of shedding new light on the mystery of just how Mars lost its atmosphere.
After 10 months in spaceflight, and a 33 minute burn to slow the orbiter enough to be captured by Mars’ gravity. And while it focuses on its science goals, some 48 hours later the first Mars satellite from India will arrive to further similar studies, including the attempt to observe methane, which could be a sign of active biology on a planet once thought to be dead.
But the question of life on Mars, past or present, may not be answered for many years to come.
It says a lot about Chris Thile as an artist and a man that he is awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 2012 with the handsome cash prize, and a year later he chooses to get back together with his old band, Nickel Creek, who he first hooked up when he was 8 years old, back in the early 90s, and who provide him more of a team-player ensemble role than any other collaboration he has been involved since.
But there was plenty of brilliance flashing from Thile’s mandolins, even if he was content to lace things together more than cover the various tunes in ribbons and bows.
Nickel Creek last toured some 7 years ago, but I guess Thile got the 7 Year Itch in reverse, and from the talk on stage tonight at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Band Shell, this is less of a reunion tour than a new beginning.
Sara Watkins’ angelic voice filled the darkened band shell with pure radiance, and her brother Sean’s fluid guitar runs with their in the moment crescendos, and the lilt of his high lonesome singing melded with Thile’s righteous tenor rafters, so that the trio brought tears to eyes and goosebumps to napes over and over.
But good golly those kids can PICK!
Kids? The Sean Watkins is old enough to run for president and Thile and Sara Watkins will be in a couple of years. And yet, they were fresh as daisies in their sheer joy of lighting up an audience and each other, even if their chops were far beyond their years.
And with Mark Scatz providing a full bodied bottom end on the basement fiddle, they tore it up. But just as often they would hang out in the air, or cast a line out into the audience and slowly pull it in, only to yank it home with a sudden surge or breathtaking downhill slues of three-part, hearts-in-synch daring do.
They have a new album, but they also played plenty of songs from their five Grammy-nominated albums from back in the day.
This lady had a much better seat in Boston than I did in Brooklyn tonight. So check this OUT.
That would have been the perfect headline for the New York Post, or some similar tabloid, if only goalie Tim Howard had managed one more save as he heroically withstood the siege, before the absolutely brilliant goal by Opie Taylor, err, Kevin De Bruyne, broke a scoreless tie in the 93rd minute of America’s loss to Belgium in the World Cup.
Most Americans likely recognize the “In your face, Flanders!” as something Homer Simpson spouted when celebrating some temporary advantage over his next door neighbor. Many will not recognize the double entendre, since the average American’s knowledge of geography and history is so poor they do not know Flanders is in Belgium.
Or that Brussels is the capital of Flanders, as well as the national capital.
Or that August 4 will mark the 100th anniversary since the German Empire invaded Flanders, their next door neighbor, on the way to attacking France. Or the fact that this region slightly smaller than Connecticut was the site of the first shots fired on the Western Front, as well as some of the last, with the most obscene warfare ever known taking place in between.
Banners seen at the beginning of FIFA World Cup matches say “Handshake for Peace.” That might appear as a sanctimonious gesture, as if the handshakes of these privileged, cocky young men could help the cause of world peace as they appear on television, having trained for months with the full advantages afforded by their governments, to reach peak physical condition, and then bask under the laurels of their well-rewarded victories. But it is a good thing to remember how governments usually spend their money to train up their young men before sending them off to face those from other nations.
According to the Telegraph, the average age of the Belgium squad is 25.2, a couple of years older than the age of the typical infantry private who died in combat in Belgium during the Great War, which was so horrific it was expected to end all wars.
Unfortunately, it took another 22 years and another fast break by the Germans through the Belgian defenses, on their way to scoring a major victory against France at the start of another war, to show us just how barbaric we humans are capable of being to our own species and why that is a lesson we should never need repeated.
Kevin “Weasley” De Bruyne (photo: Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
Fortunately, the end result of the Second World War changed the face of nationalism (at least in Europe) to the point that, when we see the young Frenchmen and Germans facing each other Friday afternoon, we can no longer imagine them bashing each others’ brains out with rifle butts, or battle axes, or sticks and stones, as they have through almost every generation since before Caesar was a boy.
Civilization has always depended upon humans learning to channel their most primitive impulses into more acceptable and hopefully peaceful and productive avenues of expression and release. Competitive athletics can help achieve that in some very real ways.
