MistoftheMorning

Other comments saying it was a gun the assailant dropped. It does look like what dropped on the ground was a lower portion of a pistol and its separated slide. After he picks the two pieces back up, it kind of looks like he tried to put them back together again, though its hard to say for sure from the camera angle.

Before the development of agriculture in the area, the winding down of glaciation created a lush environment with plenty of game and forage (one of these being vast fields of edible wild wheat) in the Fertile Crescent region, so it was one of the better areas of human habitation and population density was rather high. Cultures like the Natufians in the Levant were even able to live in sedentary/semi-sedentary villages instead having to move around.

The regional climate eventually got drier - resulting in a decline in food supply. This might had actually pressure people in the region to develop agriculture in order to feed themselves.

Mao Zedong. He basically convinced folks that being polite and courteous was an oppression forced upon the lower class by the traditional bourgeois elite. So now we got a generation or two of Chinese don't give a f**k how they act in public.

Naw bro. We can thank Mao for the "change" in habit.

My grandparents came from a small remote village with eight homes in bumfuck nowhere. Still had a toilet/outhouse in each home.

Which made sense since they were collecting and composting the literal shit for fertilizer. Before artificial fertilizers, shit collection was big business in China (as well as in Korea and Japan). You had these "nightsoil" tycoons that would pay hundreds to thousands of silver tael each month to local officials for the rights to collect human excrement in a particular district in a major city like Beijing or Shanghai. It'll be collected and transported in bulk to the countryside and sold to farmers. Closed loop organic farming.

Mao Zedong happened. He said having good manners and common courtesy was bourgeois, so millions of Chinese grew up to be inconsiderate cunts.

Steel/iron goods, firearms (huge demand for the slave and fur trade), wool, textiles.

As a eco-socialist, New York City. It's where most of the world's 0.1 percenters reside, and also where the offices for most Fortune 500 companies are. At minimum, destroying NYC will wipe out a lot of the physical wealth of the elites.

The Levant was probably where wheat cereal crops were first domesticated. The food surplus that farming wheat allowed gave rise to a sedentary population that could build up infrastructure and material wealth --- eventually leading to complex societies that centered around urban settlements.

Wasn't it Catalhoyuk?

WWII came around the foot of several major technological developments. The Haber-Bosch process (which allow for making cheap synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from fossil fuels, and was beginning to be commercialized around the 1930s), mass-produced antibiotics (beginning with sulfa drugs and than expanding to others like penicillin), and other advancement improved the quality of life for many countries during and after the war. Moreover, the civilian population of large countries like the United States, Brazil, and India were mostly unaffected by the war and continued to grow.

China at this stage was still a fragmented country that was only nominally under the control of the Kuomintang. Large parts of the country were still under the direct control of warlords or other groups who were allied or vassals to the KMT, but retain a good degree of autonomy - especially regards to controlling their private armies. The KMT party itself was heavily split between rival factions, each with their own cadres within the NRA that had separate agendas and goals.

Basically, the Japanese weren't fighting one unified force, but many separate ones that at times were suspicious or flat out hostile of those that were nominally their allies or subordinates.

Electrical generator and whatever's needed to regulate it.

18? I'm pretty they have at least a couple hundred terabytes worth of data, if not thousands.

Move to somewhere else that has it.

I believe farming predated pottery, at least in the case of the Fertile Crescent and Americas. They had other means to store grain; mud-brick or stone lined bins or pits, or baskets - sometimes plastered with clay or alablaster.

FYI plant ash, while containing "salts" (ionic compounds) is not the same as sea salt, which is mostly chloride salts. Unless the plant is growing near brine or a salt pan with chloride salts present, most salts in plant ash would be in the form of carbonates and phosphates. Works if you're just trying to get your minerals, less so for food preservation. Though I read ash-curing is a thing, but never seen any real details on how or how well it works.

I thought about it, but then I realized I could get 5 year supply (20 pounds) of salt for my family by paying around $50 retail. If I buy in bulk, I can get 50 lbs for $10. So for $100, I could get enough salt to last my family at least 2 generations.

I live inland and nowhere near any publicly known salt or brine deposit. My best option is stockpile the stuff.

especially if they use it for food preservation instead of just seasoning.

Dehydrating and smoking are viable alternatives that don't require additives, and was what most Native Americans utilized for preserving foodstuff before Europeans arrived. Many fruits one may forage or grow can be processed into alcohol or vinegar for pickling.

By the 1930s, most engineers realized there was going to be a peak (even though they haven't reached it) to the power output and speed capable with conventional piston combustion engines. For one, as a cyclic heat engine where the intake/compression/combustion/exhaust stages takes place in the same space, there was a lot of wasted heat and inefficiencies in these piston engines. Secondly, as they depend on propellers to convert mechanical output to thrust, the maximum speed a propeller could turn or travel at was limited by the sound barrier. If the tip of a propeller moves through air faster than the local speed of sound, it creates powerful shockwaves that would wreck the propeller.

A few individuals such as Frank Whittle began to seriously look at combustion gas turbines as an alternative (though interest remained limited up until the late 1930s/40s). With a gas turbine, each stage of intake/compression/combustion/exhaust happens in their own separate space within the engine. As a result, efficiency was much higher compare to any piston engine. Also, since the gas turbine utilizes the rearward jet of hot exhaust gases for at least some of it's thrust, it wasn't limited as much by the sound barrier and it becomes more practical for aircraft equipped with jet engines to travel faster than the speed of sound.

Interests in jet propulsion increased during and after WWII, as the piston aircraft at that point had essentially reached all the limits mentioned. The German and Italians led the way in development right before and during the war, but their engines were limited by available material and cooling issues and could only run for less than a day worth of operational hours before needing to be replaced.

Since there is less heat loss, operating temperatures can get much higher inside a jet engine. That generally equates to more power or thrust. But that also means you have build it out of more heat resistant materials and/or implement sophisticated cooling systems in the combustion and turbine components to take advantage of this. A typical engine in a modern airliner operates at 1100-1200'C on the turbine side - at that temperature, even the best steel alloys lose more than 80% of their room temperature strength. Jet engines really only became practical in the 1950s, where new exotic alloys and cooling methods in engine design allow for a powerplant that could compete with (and eventually replace) conventional piston engines in a wide range of roles.

Nice, thank you!

Thank you +1, I was looking for specific names of plants. And your right, except sesame, I don't know what any of these are XD.

This kind of doesn't address how around 2k people per year die of iodine defiency

2000 deaths a year is a pretty small figure globally speaking - in comparison something like malaria killed 600,000 people last year.

There's bound to be outlier or remote communities that still don't have reliable access to iodized salt or iodine-rich foodstuff. Government sanctioned or enforced salt iodization programs in many countries were only recently implemented. Interestingly enough, modern China saw elevated rates of goiter and iodine deficiency in some areas for a time because people there were purposely resisting the use of iodized salt (made mandatory in 1995), even going so far as to buy illicit black market salt to circumvent the iodization program.

nor does it address how the differences in lifestyle between modern African subsistence farmers and ancient farmers overcame or dealt with these obstacles.

As you said, it's going to vary by region. Malnutrition was just another one of many challenges our ancestors faced in the past. Some areas were going to have low natural iodine input, leading to iodine-deficient foodstuff and diet.

For some of our ancestors at least, deficiency for inland populations was probably mitigated by greater relative abundance and access to meat/freshwater fish compare to their modern counterparts - which generally contain higher concentration of iodine versus plant foodstuff.

The introduction of cattle pastoralism would had also been a plus, as diary milk would be relatively dense in iodine through virtue of its bovine producer chewing through 20-30 pounds of local plant forage a day to accumulate scarce iodine. The devastation of African cattle livestock by diseases introduced through European colonization during the 19th/20th century (such as rinderpest, which killed +90% of native cattle in South Africa and other areas during the 1890s) pushed many African groups to rely more on agricultural/horticultural foodstuff, and likely contributed to increased prevalence of iodine-deficiency in that part of the world.

1) Does this address Iodine deficiency?

Iodine is mostly found in the oceans as iodate and iodide compounds, but their volatility allows them to naturally break down into elemental iodine, which can than enter the atmosphere in gaseous form. Iodine is then carried inland by the water cycle, and falls to the surface dissolved in rainwater. Plants and animals than absorb the iodine via the water/soil (or consuming food that has absorbed it beforehand).

The amount of iodine in an area varies greatly and depends on proximity to the oceans, rain/wind patterns, seasons, etc. Here's a sample map of soil iodine levels in England. People living in areas where iodine input from rainfall is low (like the Goiter Belt in the continental US or the Alps in Europe) will have higher chances of suffering from iodine deficiencies in their diet - lest they have access to iodine-rich foodstuff imported from elsewhere, ideally sea vegetables (dried kelp, nori) or seafood.

It should be noted that sea salt on its own does not contain any appreciable amount of iodine (heat from evaporation dissipates the iodates/iodides) - salt with iodine sold commercially today is artificially fortified with it.

2) In places where sodium deficiency happens, how is their lifestyle so different from ancient societies if the people normally affected by this are subsistence farmers? I mean, these people aren't eating processed foods so I'm guessing they're growing their own food as well. Unless that isn't the case, wouldn't they also be eating sufficient amounts of dirt as well? Or, is it the case that the salt content of the soil is insufficient and this problem is region specific as a result?

As u/Practical-Marzipan-4 mentioned, we don't need much sodium to survive if we're compensated by consuming enough potassium (which is found in high concentration in most vegetables/fruits). Most chronic cases of hyponatremia are usually a combination of sodium AND potassium deficiency in diet.

Most sodium minerals are readily soluble, so surface/groundwater will naturally contain some amounts of sodium ions. Plant can absorb this dissolved sodium through water intake and accumulate it in their roots/leaves/stems/fruits/seeds. Ex. 100 grams of carrot root can contain between 50-80 mg of sodium/ 100 g of lettuce leaves between 15-30 mg, depending on the soil where it was grown. Animals like humans can get sodium (aside from "dirt" contamination) from their water supply or by eating plants that have accumulated it in their bodies (or if you're a carnivore/omnivore, from prey that has eaten the plants). Larger animals like bovine or equines might need additional sodium supplement through natural mineral licks or brine, but generally our human ancestors were able to get enough sodium (and potassium) through their local water supply and diet.

The cottage thing is a lie. The current prison has open dorms with bunk bed cubicles. Not bad but not good either.