Some interesting facts

COTTON

For as long as 7,000 years, cotton has been grown, picked, woven, and fashioned into materials as diverse as jeans, underwear, shirts, and even animal feed! Almost 757.1 million liters (200 million gallons ) of cottonseed oil are used in food products such as margarine and salad dressing. Even products such as toothpaste, ice cream, and, of course, the paper money used to by them, contain by-products of the cotton seed.

This productivity comes with a price. Conventionally grown cotton use a total of $2.6 billion worth of hazardous pesticides, some of them the most toxic in the market. These include carbamate pesticides, as well as broad spectrum organophoshates, which were originally developed as toxic nerve agents during Wold War II 

BANANA

There are over 500 varieties of banana today. This means that if you ate a different kind of banana each day, you would take almost a year and a half to eat every last one! In fact, about 99.5% of banana-eaters in the world are eating varieties of banana that have been selected by farmers and haven't changed in centuries. But wait : Not All Bananas Are Edible!

In any case, bananas are loved and eaten the world over. East Africans, and Ugandans in particular, eat around 450 kg(9921.1 lbs) per person per year. In East Africa, the word for bananas is "matooke," which also means"food".

Bananas may be valuable, but there are many problems involved in their cultivation. For instance, almost all cultivated bananas are seedless and sterile. This means that they can't be grown from seeds. Banana plants also take up to 18 months to fruit, which makes them even harder to breed.

If those problems aren't big enough, consider the fact that bananas can get sick, too. An illness of bananas called Black Sigatoka can cut a harvest by as much as 50%. Farmers control the disease by spraying banana crops with fungicide up to 40 times in one growing season. 

Man's Evolution

New Discovery Tells The True Story Of Man's Evolution

The conventional theory about the evolution of mankind is that the modern humans marched out of Africa some 50,000 years ago and then spread to all parts of the globe, replacing all other hominid types that had come before. This traditional idea now stands the risk of being supplanted, thanks to a stunning new discovery. The finding of the tip of a girl's 40,000 year old finger, which was announced in the first week of January 2012, has helped scientists create a complex new pictures of the origin of humans. Analyses done through new gene sequencing technology have shown that modern humans encountered and bred with at  least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times. Theses two ancient human groups are the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out nearly 30,000 years ago; and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time as the Neanderthals.

The finding of the girl's pinky finger bone and an oddly shaped molar form a young adult have helped scientists in unraveling some complex genetic puzzles. A revolutionary increase in the speed and a decline in the cost of gene sequencing technology have enabled the scientists at the Max Plank Institute, Germany  to map the genomes of both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Comparing genomes, scientists have concluded that today's humans outside Africa carry an average of 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, and that people from parts of Oceania carry about 5 percent Denisovan DNA. These findings have put the focus on the phenomenon of interbreeding between different humans species. This has thus firmly brought into question the assumption that modern humans originated exclusively in Africa, and then spread out therefrom.