Quartz: Egyptian archeologists have identified one of the world’s oldest cheeses—and it might be poisonous

The “solidified whitish mass” was first found a few years ago in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian mayor, at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo. The tomb was discovered in 1885, only for its location to be hidden by shifting sands, according to The New York Times. It was rediscovered in 2010.

While archaeologists suspected the substance was food, they were only just able to establish it was cheese. Tests to confirm the sample were carried out by teams from the University of Catania in Italy and the University of Cairo and suggested the substance was a “dairy product,” likely created by mixing sheep or goat and cow milk. The full details of the find were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry in late July.

Tests on the cheese also found traces of the bacteria which causes brucellosis, an infectious disease caused by consuming unpasteurized dairy products. Brucellosis can trigger bouts of fever, headaches, and muscle pain. Given this, the researchers are hopeful that this discovery will contribute to a range of fields beyond archaeology, from “medicine history to the forensic sciences.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Post-Narco Urbanism

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious  drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying 80% of the world’s cocaine and the violence surrounding the drug trade had become extreme. The bloodshed was focused in the city of Medellin.

As the years went on, Medellin became the most dangerous city in the world. In 1991 alone, around 6,000 people were killed. The murder rate was almost 400 people per 100,000 residents, which is three or four times more than the world’s most violent cities in recent history.

But today, Medellin is very different. In just thirty years, it’s transformed from being the bloody cocaine capital of the world into a place that’s often described as a “model city.” It’s now safer than many cities in the U.S, and, to the surprise of many, one of the things that helped to pull the city out of the violence was a whole new approach to urban planning, including a major overhaul of the city’s public transportation system.

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99 Percent Invisible: Right to Roam

When 99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle’s father Jim Mingle retired, he began walking —a lot. He’d always been a walker, but with more time, he took up long-distance, multi-day trips. And even though he’s an American, he mostly preferred to walk in the UK. In fact, over the course of a decade, he walked the entire length of Great Britain.

On one of his many trips, Jim found he needed to hitchhike (rather than walk) back to the village where he was staying. A jeep pulled up and he hopped in. The driver was dressed in a traditional tweed outfit with a funny cap. He introduced himself as the gamekeeper for Madonna and her then husband, Guy Ritchie. Katie’s dad had been walking across their private estate.

This walk across private land was not unusual. Thousands of distance walkers in Britain, regularly do the same thing , which is different from what people typically do in the United States. If you wanted to walk across America, you’d have to do it on a combination of public trails and roads and you certainly couldn’t cut across Madonna’s property.

In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England.

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Aeon: In 2009, a man arrived in an Irish town with a plan to disappear forever

In 2009, a grey-haired man arrived by bus in the seaport town of Sligo in Ireland. Under the name Peter Bergmann, he checked into a hotel and carried three large pieces of luggage to his room. Over the next three days, he was captured by closed-circuit security cameras leaving the hotel with a full plastic bag and returning to his room with nothing. On the fourth day, he went to the nearby seaside village of Rosses Point, where he would later wash up on the shore. A haunting mystery unravelled through a combination of eye-witness interviews and CCTV footage, The Last Days of Peter Bergmann is an existential rumination on a mysterious man’s story – or perhaps on its absence.

Politico: Britain’s middle-class Brexit Anxiety Disorder

For Britain’s pro-European middle classes, Brexit is akin to a psychological trauma which has left many unable to behave rationally, according to two leading experts. Far from being hyper-rational observers concerned only with what is economically sensible, many have morphed into the “Remainiacs” of Brexiteer disdain. [...]

To an extent unparalleled in British political history, Brexit has ripped away the veneer of security that the managerial and professional classes enjoyed, throwing — in their mind at least — almost everything into question, from the U.K.’s place in the world to the future prosperity of their children. It is a threat that many find hard to cope with psychologically.

It is also something many of them feel can be blamed on those over whom Britain’s educated professionals usually have day-to-day political, economic and social control — the working-class, provincial, poor and elderly who were over-represented among Leave voters. [...]

Such a prognosis goes some way to explaining why other EU countries are far less concerned by Brexit than the U.K., even if it could have similar, if less severe, disruptive economic effects. For Britain, Brexit is existential, affecting almost all its political, diplomatic and economic ties with Europe — and therefore more likely to cause anxiety about the future. For other countries, it is just a pain.

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