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from the let's-have-a-drink-to-celebrate dept.
Archaeologists have unearthed an approximately 5,000-year-old brewery in China:
It's the oldest beer-making facility ever discovered in China – and the evidence indicates that these early brewers were already using specialized tools and advanced beer-making techniques. For instance, the scientists found a pottery stove, which the ancient brewers would have heated to break down carbohydrates to sugar. And the brewery's underground location was important for both storing beer and controlling temperature – too much heat can destroy the enzymes responsible for that carb-to-sugar conversion, explains Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the current research.
[...] The research group inspected the pots and jugs, and found ancient grains that had lingered inside. The grains showed evidence that they had been damaged by malting and mashing, two key steps in beer making. Residue from inside the uncovered pots and funnels was tested with ion chromatography to find out what the ancient beer was made of. The 5,000-year-old beer "recipe" was published [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601465113] on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday May 25 2016, @09:16AM
User #51zXXXXX (no)Info):
I don't need to scratch my head and search my soul to figure out whether God created the universe. I was there. I saw the whole thing.
God didn't create the universe. Well, He did, but not intentionally. God just wanted a beer. But you can't just create a beer floating in the middle of the void -- there's nothing satisfying about it. It would be like a book written by an illiterate person -- sure, he could put lots of black squiggles onto a bundle of pages that would vaguely look like a book, but it wouldn't mean anything.
So for a proper beer, God pretty much had to make up physics. I'm not just talking about the refinements needed to get it to foam just right -- I'm talking about the whole deal. After you drink some, there should be less left over, not more. Drinking a beer should not make you turn into beer yourself. Beers should not be smarter than the drinker. Well, not the first few, at least. The state of drinking beer needs to contrast with something, so the state of not drinking beer must also exist. In fact, that's where most of the world came from, because having the world exist in only two states (currently drinking beer/currently not drinking beer) just seemed too lame to a clever guy like God. Same idea for water and other liquids -- if He can drink beer, He really ought to be able to drink not-beer, just so He can say He chose the beer instead.
And then there's the whole question of origins. A beer is so much less interesting if it creates itself or just spontaneously comes into existence. A truly full-bodied beer needs a background, a character, a story. God went a little crazy with that, inventing those 'human' things with enough cleverness to invent stuff, curiousity to try things out, and a desperate need to get sloshed, smashed, trashed, and basically totally drucking funk. And all that cleverness and curiousity necessitated science. And dinosaur fossils. And religion. (God got a real kick when he realized he'd have to invent religion, I remember. Of course, he wasn't exactly sober by that time...)
Oh, and you know that bit about "...and on the 7th day He rested?" Purely an excuse to keep us from bothering Him during His hangover. We're still on the 7th day, see. I'm not even sure if He thought far enough ahead to make an 8th day. He was having some trouble with the notion of Time, and I recall Him saying something like "aw, screw it. Nobody's going to be drinking any beer at the speed of light anyway. I'll see you later -- I'm gonna go get wasted."
Not mine. Not sure whose. But it beats a Flying Spagetti Monster and Merlot!