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It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

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Researchers identify the oldest cheese so far found, from 3,600 years ago

One of the ancient cheese samples
Click for full image, figure 1 from the paper.

Researchers have confirmed that three clumps of organic matter taken from a gravesite in northwestern China are the oldest samples of cheese yet identified — more than 3,600 years old — and are in fact a specific kind of cheese, called kefir cheese.

And it’s not just any cheese: Cow and goat DNA, as well as the bacterium Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens, has indicated that these clumps were in fact kefir cheese, providing insight into the history and evolution of probiotics and human health. L. kefiranofaciens is still a key microorganism in kefir soft cheeses. The researchers also identified the microscopic fungal species Pichia kudriavzevii, which is a type of yeast found in kefir grains today.

These kefir grains contain a host of probiotic bacteria and yeast, which is key in fermenting milk to produce kefir products that have been studied for their health impacts, particularly in the areas of the immune and gastrointestinal systems, as well as metabolic regulation.

“Our observation suggests kefir culture has been maintained in Northwestern China’s Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age,” Fu said.

You can read the published paper here. The researchers suggest the cheese indicates not only the evolutionary history by which humans began creating such diary products, it also suggests the historical routes this process followed across the European and Asian continents.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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