3,700 Year-Old Wine

Source: Photo: George Washington University

These 3,700-year-old jars were discovered in an ancient palatial wine cellar unearthed by researchers at Tel Kabri in July 2013.

Would you drink wine flavoured with mint, honey and a dash of psychotropic resins? Ancient Canaanites did more than 3,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have unearthed what may be the oldest -- and largest -- ancient wine cellar in the Near East, containing forty jars, each of which would have held fifty litres of strong, sweet wine. The cellar was discovered in the ruined palace of a sprawling Canaanite city in northern Israel, called Tel Kabri. The site dates to about 1,700 B.C. and isn't far from many of Israel's modern-day wineries.
"This is a hugely significant discovery -- it's a wine cellar that, to our knowledge, is largely unmatched in age and size," says Eric Cline chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of at The George Washington University. Cline and Assaf Yasur-Landau, chair of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, co-directed the excavation. Andrew Koh, assistant professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, was an associate director.
The team's findings will be presented this Friday in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
Archaeological scientist Andrew Koh who was an associate director of the excavation analyzed the jar fragments using organic residue analysis. He found molecular traces of tartaric and syringic acid, both key components in wine, as well as compounds suggesting ingredients popular in ancient wine-making, including honey, mint, cinnamon bark, juniper berries and resins. The recipe is similar to medicinal wines used in ancient Egypt for two thousand years.
At the end of the excavation, the team discovered two doors leading out of the wine cellar -- one to the south, and one to the west. Both probably lead to additional storage rooms. They'll have to wait until 2015 to find out for sure.

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The Good News in Bad News

Psychology shows that it doesn't take much to put you in a bad mood. Just reading the morning news can do it. And being in a bad mood slows your reaction time, and affects your basic cognitive abilities like speech, writing, and counting. 
But new research by Dr. Moshe Shay Ben-Haim, Yaniv Mama, Michal Icht, and Daniel Algom of Tel Aviv University's School of Psychological Sciences now reveals that repeated exposure to a negative event neutralizes its effect on your mood and your thinking. 
“A bad mood is known to slow cognition," says Dr. Ben-Haim. "We show that, counterintuitively, you can avoid getting into a bad mood in the first place by dwelling on a negative event. If you look at the newspaper before you go to work and see a headline about a bombing or tragedy of some kind, it's better to read the article all the way through and repeatedly expose yourself to the negative information. You will be freer to go on with your day in a better mood and without any negative effects."

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Are Teens Under  Pressure to be Sexting?

New research studying the pressures of sexting on adolescents has found that friends and romantic partners are the main source of social pressure, outweighing adolescents' own attitudes. 
The paper 'Under pressure to sext? Applying the theory of planned behavior to adolescent sexting', by Michel Walrave, Wannes Heirman & Lara Hallam, published in Behavior & Information Technology, studied the beliefs, social pressures, and predictors of sexting in adolescents.
Adolescents revealed that they sext for attention, to lower the chances of catching STDs, and to find a romantic partner. The concepts of receiving a bad reputation, or of being blackmailed, did not appear to influence their motivations. The authors note that "Remarkably, only the behavioral beliefs that expected positive outcomes of sexting were significant in predicting adolescents' willingness to engage in it."
Friends and romantic partners were found to be the only significant social pressures that affect an individual's motivation to sext: "The more positive the perceived social pressure that originates from these two categories of referents -- who mostly belong to the peer group -- the more adolescents will be inclined to engage in sexting." Negative pressures from parents and teachers did not affect motivations.
Adolescents were most likely to sext if they had complete trust in the recipient. Likewise, a lack of trust would have a significantly adverse effect. In addition, the more positive social pressure they had from romantic partners, the more they were inclined to sext. 
The study surveyed 498 adolescents aged between 15 and 18 years. 

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Do Messy Children Learn Better?

Attention, parents: The messier your child gets while playing with food in the high chair, the more he or she is learning.
Researchers at the University of Iowa studied how 16-month-old children learn words for nonsolid objects, from oatmeal to glue. Previous research has shown that toddlers learn more readily about solid objects because they can easily identify them due to their unchanging size and shape. 
In a paper published in the journal Developmental Science, Larissa Samuelson, associate professor in psychology at the UI and her team at the UI tested their idea by exposing 16-month-olds to 14 nonsolid objects, mostly food and drinks such as applesauce, pudding, juice, and soup. They presented the items and gave them made-up words, such as "dax" or "kiv." A minute later, they asked the children to  identify the same food in different sizes or shapes. The task required the youngsters to go beyond relying simply on shape and size and to explore what the substances were made of to make the correct identification and word choice.
Not surprisingly, many children gleefully dove into this task by poking, prodding, touching, feeling, eating -- and yes, throwing -- the nonsolids in order to understand what they were and make the correct association with the hypothetical names.