"When farmers showed up from the Near East about 7,500 years ago, eager to grow their grains in the soil of Central Europe, they were met by indigenous hunters and gatherers. The locals, apparently, did not welcome them with open arms." New research suggests that "for some 2,000 years, these distinct groups refused to mesh and would rarely cross their cultural boundaries to find a mate." [The Washington Post]
Study: Farmer and hunter groups 'kept their distance' from each other in Stone Age
A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters
The International System of Units capitalizes a unit's symbol only when the unit is named for a person, which leaves the liter with a lowercase l that is easy to… READ THE REST
Britain's £36 million peanut farm harvested less than it planted
In 1946, with Britain still on wartime rationing and short of cooking fat, Clement Attlee's government approved a plan to plant peanuts across 3 million acres of Tanganyika, a stretch… READ THE REST
What if the whole planet ran on a single clock?
Every so often someone proposes to abolish time zones entirely and put the whole planet on a single clock. It would be the same time everywhere at once: when it… READ THE REST
This $20 PDF editor keeps your files off the cloud and on your device (MSRP $50)
Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post. TL;DR: Tackle PDFs with ease forever with an IndyPDF Editor and Converter lifetime subscription, on sale now… READ THE REST
Learning a new language is less intimidating with Promova for only $80
Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post. TL;DR: Build confidence in a new language with Promova's lifetime subscription for $79.99 (reg. $299.99). Learning a new language… READ THE REST
A popular platform is making it easier to read in your spare time, and it's only $70 for life
Disclosure: Boing Boing earns a commission on purchases made through links in this post. TL;DR: Headway is a mobile app that condenses fiction and non-fiction books into quick summaries, and it's only… READ THE REST
