Just in time for National Popcorn Day, a new study shows that people in what’s now Peru were eating the snack about 2,000 years earlier than we thought.

Coastal peoples were preparing corn­based foods up to 6,700 years ago, according to analysis of remains of the ancient corn recently discovered at the Paredones and Huaca Prieta archaeological sites on Peru’s northern coast.

Previously, evidence of corn as a food about 5,000 years ago had mostly come from what are called microfossils — microscopic remains that do not offer information on the size and shape of the corncobs (玉米棒). But the new­found corn remains revealed a lot, via radiocarbon dating and other tests.

The people who lived in Paredones and Huaca Prieta probably cooked corn in several ways：Wrapping a corncob and resting it on coals, roasting a corncob directly over a flame, or cooking a corncob in an earthen oven. In this culture, corn was a delicious food or a minor supplement to the diet — archaeological evidence shows they did not eat it in large amounts.

Corn was first grown in Mexico about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, according to Piperno, whose research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A few thousand years later, corn was brought to South America, where farmers bred the plant crop into hundreds of varieties.

Indeed, what surprised Piperno most about the new research was the diversity of corn — from   corncob shapes to kernel (玉米粒)colors discovered in the new­found remains. “Farmers like to experiment and grow cool things，” she said.

A study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology took a closer look at music in sports, specifically how listening to music could affect one’s overall performance.

Researchers asked 150 volunteers to throw a ball into a basket. For the first stage of the study, participants threw the ball from a fixed point. They threw the ball while listening to music of their choice, while not listening to music, or while listening to music that the researchers selected. For the second stage they were able to choose where to stand when throwing the ball and performed the same activity with the various music choices.

The study found that listening to music, whether it was music of the volunteer’s choice or a song chosen for them, did not make the participants more or less likely to get the ball in the basket. It had no effect. What it did do was increase self-esteem and make the study participants more likely to take risks, especially for males who were allowed to choose their own music.

The results suggest that music may pump you up. And it may even help you work out harder and longer than you would without it. But no matter what song you listen to, it’s not going to help you get that ball into the basket.

Another study took a detailed look at how music pace might affect exercise. Researchers found that listening to high-pace music makes people feel like they’re working out less while also benefiting their bodies more.

Listening to high-pace music while exercising resulted in the highest heart rate compared with not listening to music. This means that the exercise seemed like less effort, but it was more beneficial in terms of enhancing physical fitness.

The study found that the beneficial effects of high-pace music were greatest for people who were walking or running and were felt the least for those who were doing high-intensity exercises such as weightlifting.