Posts Tagged ‘china’

The World’s Oldest Stash: Scientists Find 2,700-Year-Old Pot

weed.jpgScientists have discovered two pounds of a dried plant that turned out to be the oldest marijuana in the world. Inside one of the Yanghai Tombs excavated in the Gobi Desert, a team of researchers found the cannabis packed into a wooden bowl resting inside a 2,700-year-old grave. It was placed near the head of a blue-eyed, 45-year-old shaman among other objects like bridles and a harp to be used in afterlife.

At first, the researchers thought the dried weed was coriander. Then they spent 10 months getting the cannabis from the tomb in China to a secret lab in England. Finally, the team put the stash through “microscopic botanical analysis” including carbon dating and genetic analysis, and discovered the stash was really pot.

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December 8th, 2008 Tags: , ,
by Boonsri Dickinson in Food, Nutrition, & More Food, Where We Came From & Where We're Going | 7 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

The Air Over There: As the Olympics End, a Look Back at Air Quality

beijing.jpgThe Olympics have come and gone amid a flurry of panic over the air quality in Beijing. But now that the athletes are packed up and boarding planes, we have a consensus: The air wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone feared. We described last month how the Chinese government closed down factories near Beijing and only allowed cars on the road every other day. Months into the clean air diet and billions of dollars later, Beijing set a record of its own: It had eight straight days of “excellent” air, the longest stretch of good weather the city has seen in a decade.

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August 26th, 2008 Tags: ,
by Boonsri Dickinson in Pollution Solutions (& Disasters) | 1 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >