SPIEGEL Surfs the Web World's Oldest Noodle
More dried up than a plastic bowl of top ramen, a 4,000-year-old noodle dish has just been discovered buried in the silt of the Yellow River. This proves that:
- a) the world's first noodles were probably eaten in China
- b) people were eating noodles 1,000 years earlier than previously thought
- c) ancient man was no better at cleaning take-away left-overs out of the fridge than his modern day equivalent.
"These are undoubtedly the oldest noodles ever found," Houyuan Lu at China's Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing told the New Scientist . And arguably the most unappetizing. The find has also managed get the online community talking.
A New Asian Voice for the World
Trying to find the latest news from Asia? Next time you might want to consider skipping the usual suspects and instead check out the Asia News Network . The site, which is partially funded by Germany's influential Konrad Adenauer Institute, pulls together reports published in more than a dozen major Asian newspapers. Want to read more about the earthquake in Kashmir? Why read your local paper's foreign correspondent when you can read the report from the local correspondent of India's Statesman? And while you're on the site, you can read-up on stories that get neglected by your local media.
Talking to the World through the Web
It's a curious disparity: The Internet is routinely heralded as a utopian medium that breaks down barriers between peoples, but, for the most part, the majority of us have built a pretty impenetrable Web-surfing routine. Furnished with the Web's limitless means of transportation, a lot of people still don't venture far outside their own comfort zone.
A new project, Global Voices Online , intends to change that. Sponsored by Harvard Law School, the site seeks to track world events by aggregating the work of citizen bloggers from the four corners of the globe.
It makes for handy one-stop-shopping. You can catch up with citizens from Iran to Bolivia with the click of the mouse. You can read-up on Tajikistan and then learn how to find it on the map.
