Ancient Egypt had powerful Sudan rival, British Museum dig shows

By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent


The Second Kushite Kingdom controlled the whole Nile valley from Khartoum to the Mediterranean from 720BC to 660BC.

Now archaeologists have discovered that a region of northern Sudan once considered a forgotten backwater once actually "a real power-base".

They discovered a ruined pyramid containing fine gold jewellery dating from about 700BC on a remote un-navigable 100-mile stretch of the Nile known as the Fourth Cataract, plus pottery from as far away as Turkey.

Other finds included numerous examples of ancient rock art and 'musical' rocks that were tapped to create a melodic sound.

They only made the discoveries after being invited by the Sudanese authorities to help excavate part of the Merowe region, which is soon to be flooded by a large hydro-electric dam. More than 10,000 sites were found.

Historians had written off the area as being of little archaeological interest.

Dr Derek Welsby, of the British Museum, said: "We had no idea how rich the area was."

Remarkably well-preserved bodies, naturally mummified in the desert air, and a cow buried complete with eye ointment were also unearthed.

Dr Welsby said the finds revolutionised the history and geography of the Kushite kingdoms.

The First Kushite Kingdom rivalled Egypt for power between 2500BC and 1500BC, when many of Egypt's largest pyramids were built, he said.

"All our preconceptions about this being a relatively poor, inhospitable area were completely wrong," he remarked. We thought the first kingdom gradually grew over 1,000 years; now we know it happened right at the beginning, very rapidly.

"During the second kingdom we thought it was an area everybody bypassed. But finding the pyramid meant it was a real power-base. This was not a backwater, it was partaking in the major trade routes in the world."

The team was able to excavate hundreds of heavy items, including large blocks adorned with rock art and 390 stones that comprised the pyramid, with the help of trucks and cranes lent by Iveco and New Holland.

The Sudanese authorities gave 20 such blocks and musical 'rock gongs', plus pottery and jewellery to the British Museum. A selection will be put on display early next year.

Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Egyptian Temple near Pomorie

Remains of a temple complex dedicated to the cult of Isis and Osiris were discovered in the Paleokastro region in Pomorie.
The temple dates back from the second century A.C., announced Burgasinfo

The building was built on the grounds of an ancient Thracian pagan temple, claim the archaeologists.

"There are many temples in Bulgaria, connected to Isis and Osiris, but this is the first temple complex, discovered through the means of archaeology", explains Sergey Torbanov, leader of the diggings.

During this season the main street in Anhialo was also discovered. The site of the diggings is put under security.

The artifacts, found during the working process, will be exhibited in Pomorie State Museum.

Biggest Dinosaurs Grew Huge by Not Chewing Their Food

Kate Ravilious
Dinosaurs known as sauropods—the largest land animals that ever lived—grew huge and were an evolutionary success in part because they didn't bother to chew their food, new research suggests.

Sauropods weighed up to 88 tons (80 metric tons)—ten times more than an African elephant—and measured as high as 23 feet (7 meters).

The group of dinosaurs, which included the brachiosaurus and diplodocus, loomed over the animal kingdom for more than 140 million years until the late Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.

Scientists think the animals evolved to be so large to discourage big predators, like Tyrannosaurus rex, from eating them. But how they maintained such massive body sizes has remained mysterious.

The herbivores, or plant-eaters, had hardly any teeth and are thought to have swallowed their food whole—an entire bush in one gulp, for example. They browsed large areas, barely moving and consuming vast quantities in short periods of time.

So they needed long necks to reach food high in trees and a huge gut to process and break down their unchewed meals, said Martin Sander, a palaeontologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and co-author of the study, published tomorrow in the journal Science.

"You can only have this long neck if you don't chew your food, otherwise your head would be full of teeth and too heavy to support," he said.

Paul Upchurch, an expert on sauropods from University College London, said that "most palaeontologists agree that feeding is the key to understanding sauropod gigantism."

Survival Strategies
To outgrow their predators, sauropods didn't just need lots of food. They also needed to develop fast, so they could attain their full size before being eaten, experts said.

Sauropod bones show that they did indeed grow swiftly. A 22-pound (10-kilogram) hatchling could become a 220,000-pound (100,000-kilogram) grown-up in about 20 to 30 years—quick by dinosaur time.

"This tells us that they must have been warm-blooded and had a high metabolic rate compared to cold-blooded creatures," said the University of Bonn's Sander.

Like all dinosaurs, sauropods laid nestfuls of eggs. By producing so many young at a time, "a population could recover quickly, even after a big catastrophe," Sander said.

Large modern mammals, such as elephants, give birth to far fewer offspring, raising their chances of extinction should a disaster occur.

So why don't we see gigantic elephants and crocodiles roaming around today?

Experts think that reptiles, such as crocodiles, still maintain the egg-laying advantage, but their cold blood prevents them from growing fast enough to reach a great size.

Mammals have warm blood, but can't grow as big as sauropods due to their slow reproductive strategy and the need to chew their food.

"Daisy Chains" of Fossil Creatures Found in China

A fossil chain of shrimplike marine organisms that lived around 525 million years ago has been unearthed in China, researchers reported in October 2008.

The 22 partial or complete chains represent a bizarre and previously unknown type of animal grouping that might be associated with migration, scientists say.
The shrimplike marine organisms, a previously unknown species that lived around 525 million years ago, were found linked head-to-tail at the fossil-rich Chengjiang site in Yunnan Province.

Prehistoric Time Line

The fossils show 22 complete or partial chains containing up to 20 animals, a team led by Xianguang Hou of China's Yunnan University reports in this week's issue of the journal Science.

The fossil sample contained just one unattached individual, which was the longest specimen found at just under an inch (2.4 centimeters).

"It's a really fascinating finding—quite extraordinary, and a big puzzle," commented Nicholas Strausfeld, a regents' professor at the University of Arizona.

"The regularity of this row of animals is amazing," added Strausfeld, who wasn't part of the study team.

The extinct species, which is due to be named shortly, was a crustacean ancestor with a head shield—or carapace—and a segmented body, said team member Derek Siveter, professor of earth sciences at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

"If you found one on your plate at the local restaurant, you'd identify it as a shrimplike thing," Siveter said.

The interlinked fossil chains remained intact despite becoming stretched and twisted on the seabed.

"You can see quite clearly where individual animals have been bent at right angles, but the integrity of the chain is maintained," Siveter said.

Open Water

While it's possible the animals lived on the seabed, the study team thinks they swam or floated in the water column.

Feeding in this chained formation probably wasn't an option, since each animal's mouth opening would have been covered by the tail of the one in front, Siveter noted.

"The tail may have been grasped by the head appendages of the animal behind," he added.
Such groupings are otherwise unknown among living and extinct arthropods (the group that includes crustaceans, insects, and spiders), the study team said.

The only obvious living parallels for this kind of setup are salps, jellyfishlike ocean-drifters that are related to sea squirts, the researchers said.

Salps form lines of interlinked colonies as part of their reproductive cycle.

"But we don't find this type of reproductive mode in other arthropods," Siveter said. "So then we come back to a more simple explanation, that these animals congregated in this fashion for migration."

A loose analogy exists in today's spiny lobsters, which are found in tropical regions including the Caribbean, he said.

Though the lobsters don't link up in a chain during migration, "they march roughly in lines on the seabed at certain times of the year," Siveter said.

Migration does seem the most rational explanation for the fossils, agreed Strausfeld, of the University of Arizona.

"That's all you have to go on, quite frankly, based on the crustaceans tramping around on the planet today," he said.

Another possibility, Strausfeld said, is that the animals "may have been preserved before they hatched out of this long egg case."

The strength and precision of the chains, with their repeated head and tail insertions, suggests some kind of packaging was involved, he said.

"The egg case, if it's gelatinous, wouldn't be preserved," he added.

And the bigger, unattached specimen could represent an adult or a hatchling.

"Maybe the sac breaks down when the animal reaches a certain size," Strausfeld said.

Evolutionary Test?

The fossils date to the so-called Cambrian Explosion, a rapid evolutionary flowering when many of the major animal groups appeared.

"At that time in history there were some very strange things, and a lot of experimentation going on," Strausfeld said.

Although he knows no precedent for crustaceanlike animals producing egg cases that house numerous developing embryos, "it's possible [the fossils represent] strange ways of reproduction and development that are no longer with us," he added.

Siveter, of the University of Oxford, said the new discovery "gives us another window on this early proliferation of life, when all the major groups which sustain biodiversity to the present day were introduced to the fossil record."

Cavern of Crystal Giants

Crystal Palace
Cavers in Mexico confront extreme conditions and find extraordinary beauty.
By Neil Shea
Photograph by Carsten Peter, Speleoresearch & Films

In a nearly empty cantina in a dark desert town, the short, drunk man makes his pitch. Beside him on the billiards table sits a chunk of rock the size of home plate. Dozens of purple and white crystals push up from it like shards of glass. "Yours for $300," he says. "No? One hundred. A steal!" The three or four other patrons glance past their beers, thinking it over: Should they offer their crystals too? Rock dust on the green felt, cowboy ballads on the jukebox. Above the bar, a sign reads, "Happy Hour: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m."
This remote part of northern Mexico, an hour or so south of Chihuahua, is famous for crystals, and paychecks at the local lead and silver mine, where almost everyone works, are meager enough to inspire a black market. "Thirty dollars." He leans in. "Ten." It's hard to take him seriously. Earlier in the day, in a cave deep below the bar, I crawled among the world's largest crystals, a forest of them, broad and thick, some more than 30 feet long and half a million years old. So clear, so luminous, they seemed extraterrestrial. They make the chunk on the pool table seem dull as a paperweight.

Nothing compares with the giants found in Cueva de los Cristales, or Cave of Crystals. The limestone cavern and its glittering beams were discovered in 2000 by a pair of brothers drilling nearly a thousand feet below ground in the Naica mine, one of Mexico's most productive, yielding tons of lead and silver each year. The brothers were astonished by their find, but it was not without precedent. The geologic processes that create lead and silver also provide raw materials for crystals, and at Naica, miners had hammered into chambers of impressive, though much smaller, crystals before. But as news spread of the massive crystals' discovery, the question confronting scientists became: How did they grow so big?
It takes 20 minutes to get to the cave entrance by van through a winding mine shaft. A screen drops from the van's ceiling and Michael Jackson videos play, a feature designed to entertain visitors as they descend into darkness and heat. In many caves and mines the temperature remains constant and cool, but the Naica mine gets hotter with depth because it lies above an intrusion of magma about a mile below the surface. Within the cave itself, the temperature leaps to 112 degrees Fahrenheit with 90 to 100 percent humidity—hot enough that each visit carries the risk of heatstroke. By the time we reach the entrance, everyone glistens with sweat.
Preparing to enter the cave is like gearing up for a space walk. I pull on a vest with more than a dozen palm-size ice packs sewn into pockets across the chest and back. Then another vest to insulate the ice against the heat. Then, over everything, a bright orange caving suit. A helmet, a headlamp, a respirator mask blowing ice-cooled air. Gloves, boots. Even for cavers cocooned in all this protective gear, the heat is exhausting and dangerous; most trips inside last no more than 20 minutes. Giovanni Badino, a physicist from the Italian exploration group La Venta, leads us in.

Fallen obelisks, pillars of light, the crystals are enormous, some several feet thick. On the floor and walls are clumps of smaller crystals, sharp as blades and flawlessly transparent. Badino proceeds slowly, careful not to damage the crystals, which are made of selenite, a form of the common mineral gypsum. Selenite is translucent and soft, easily scratched by boot heels, even fingernails. Despite the ice suits, the heat and humidity are oppressive. I remove the mask for a moment and suck in wet, hot air. My lungs want to refuse it. There is a damp, heavy scent of earth and an absolute stillness. Miserable conditions for humans, a perfect nursery for crystals.

In their architecture crystals embody law and order, stacks of molecules assembled according to rigid rules. But crystals also reflect their environment. Spanish crystallographer Juan Manuel Garc�a-Ruiz was one of the first to study the Naica crystals beginning in 2001. More familiar with microscopic crystals, Garc�a was dizzied by the proportions of the Naica giants. By examining bubbles of liquid trapped inside the crystals, Garc�a and his colleagues pieced together the story of the crystals' growth. For hundreds of thousands of years, groundwater saturated with calcium sulfate filtered through the many caves at Naica, warmed by heat from the magma below. As the magma cooled, water temperature inside the cave eventually stabilized at about 136�F. At this temperature minerals in the water began converting to selenite, molecules of which were laid down like tiny bricks to form crystals. In other caves under the mountain, the temperature fluctuated or the environment was somehow disturbed, resulting in different and smaller crystals. But inside the Cave of Crystals, conditions remained unchanged for millennia. Above ground, volcanoes exploded and ice sheets pulverized the continents. Human generations came and went. Below, enwombed in silence and near complete stasis, the crystals steadily grew. Only around 1985, when miners using massive pumps lowered the water table and unknowingly drained the cave, did the process of accretion stop.

In the presence of such beauty and strangeness, people cast around for familiar metaphors. Staring at the crystals, Garc�a decided the cavern reminded him of a cathedral; he called it the Sistine Chapel of crystals. In both cathedrals and crystals there's a sense of permanence and tranquillity that transcends the buzz of surface life. In both there is the suggestion of worlds beyond us.

Now, in the cave, a team of scientists and explorers is conducting research and working on a documentary. Stein-Erik Lauritzen, a professor of geology at the University of Bergen in Norway, is retrieving samples for uranium-thorium dating. His preliminary research suggests the largest of the crystals are about 600,000 years old. Penelope Boston, an associate professor of cave and karst science at New Mexico Tech, searches for microbes that might live among the crystals. In some of them, tiny bubbles of suspended fluid—the kind García studied—sparkle in our lights. They are little time capsules: Italian scientists led by Anna Maria Mercuri extracted pollen that may have been trapped within these inclusions. The grains appear to be 30,000 years old and suggest that this part of Mexico was once covered not by desert but by forest.

One long, slender beam bears a deep scar from where someone tried to cut through it. I imagine a miner dripping and alone in the smothering silence, his weak headlamp bouncing with each saw stroke. Collectors might pay tens of thousands of dollars for a crystal from this cave. Whoever he was, he quit before he could sever the crystal, and mine owners later installed a heavy steel door to deter looters. So far it has worked, but who knows if it will last. Miners, after all, have access to drills and explosives. And while mining and construction projects can be halted to save archaeological relics, minerals in Mexico have no such protection.

The crystals could also be threatened by the lack of water. When the cave was filled, water helped support and preserve the beams. Now, with the cave empty and open to air, they may over time bend or crack under their own weight and become dull, as gases such as carbon dioxide wash in. The director of the mine told me his company, Peñoles, is dedicated to preserving them, but the company's main interest isn't crystals, and the basic activities of mining—blasting, trucks stirring up dust—threaten the gallery. Badino and others hope to convince the company to do more (lobbying for UNESCO World Heritage status has been mentioned), but so far the crystals exist in limbo, probably more famous outside Mexico than within.

We stop for a moment to rest. Everything around us glitters; it is as though we are standing inside a star. Badino turns, and the lines crease at the corners of his eyes. He pulls his mask away. "You know," he says, smiling, "there would be worse places to die."

Cathedral, star, tomb. We look for something to anchor the otherworldly in the familiar. After half an hour we depart, soaked in sweat, our veins throbbing, and a visiting filmmaker asks what it was like. I have a little trouble. He nods, understanding.

"Es como un sueño de niño," he says. "It is like a child's dream."

Underwater Museum for Egypt Sunken Treasures?

Rich with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a reproduction of two granite blocks--found a third of a mile (500 meters) apart in the Bay of Alexandria--helped prove that the pieces originally formed a single tablet.

"Sort of the whole ancient city of Alexandria is lying under the water, just meters away from the shore," said Amin of the Egyptian antiquities council in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the museum-planning process.



Divers raise a 4-foot-tall (1.5-meter-tall), granite, first-century A.D. statue of a priest of Isis from Alexandria, Egypt's bay in 1998.

A UN convention advises that submerged artifacts should remain on the seabed as a way to respect their historical context--a view endorsed by the planners of the proposed underwater museum in Alexandria, Egypt. The proposed museum got a boost in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the museum's planning.



Shown with a 2008 illustration of the proposed underwater museum (upper center), the Bay of Alexandria once contained Cleopatra's island palace and the Pharos of Alexandria lighthouse (picture), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Both of them were done in centuries ago by earthquakes.

"It will not simply be a museum as such. It is part of a whole vision to revitalize the whole city and its heritage," said Naguib Amin, the site-management expert from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.



The proposed museum's underwater facility (at bottom in architect Jacques Rougerie's conception) will be difficult and expensive to build and is the focus of the just launched two-year feasibility study. But planners believe that the benefits of plunging visitors into the historical context of the objects--on the sunken island that once held Cleopatra's palace--will be worth the trouble.

"When you go to an archaeological site, you have an irreplaceable emotion. It's not like going to see a movie," said architect Jacques Rougerie. "It's like the astronaut who cannot share with other people what it is like to be in space."



Twin sphinxes flank a statue of a priest of Isis amid fallen columns on Alexandria's sunken island of Antirhodos in a photo from the late 1990s. The statue was raised in 1998 and became part of a traveling exhibition.

Similar tableaux remain on the sunken island, which was found by underwater archaeologists in 1996, and should be visible from the proposed underwater museum.

"Having the museum around the vestiges of these objects will be an emotional and physical experience for the visitors, because they can see them [in place]," architect Rougerie said in September 2008. "You get a better perception and comprehension of what could have happened.



An eroded sphinx, shown in an undated photo, isn't much more than a silhouette in the Bay of Alexandria's dusky waters. The murk is driving the proposed museum's planners to propose covering the monuments, then cleaning the enclosed water.

"Try to picture a glass tube," said Amin of the Egyptian antiquities agency in September 2008. "You simply put it over the main monuments that we need to highlight."



The marble head of Roman princess Antonia Minor, mother of Emperor Claudius, rests on sand at the now sunken site of Cleopatra's Alexandria, Egypt, palace in an undated photo. Behind the head is a toppled statue of a Ptolemaic, or Greco-Egyptian, king in the guise of Hermes-Thoth, messenger of the gods.

Visitors to the proposed underwater museum should be able to view these artifacts in situ.



--A proposed underwater museum (illustrated above) in Alexandria, Egypt, came closer to reality in September 2008, when the UN established a committee to aid the design process with the Egyptian government. (Read full story.)

Fiberglass tunnels would connect aboveground galleries, near the New Library of Alexandria, to the underwater facility, where antiquities would be visible in their natural resting places at the site of Cleopatra's now sunken palace.

Evoking sails of Nile feluccas (photo) and the cardinal directions, the glassy, towering "four points [at center] will be like the [long-gone] Lighthouse of Alexandria that illuminated the [ancient] library and the world," said architect Jacques Rougerie, who is leading the feasibility study. "I want to do the same thing with this museum."

Heavy Metal-Eating "Superworms" Unearthed in U.K.

James Owen
Newly evolved "superworms" that feast on toxic waste could help cleanse polluted industrial land, a new study says.

These hardcore heavy metal fans, unearthed at disused mining sites in England and Wales, devour lead, zinc, arsenic, and copper.

The earthworms excrete a slightly different version of the metals, making them easier for plants to suck up. Harvesting the plants would leave cleaner soil behind.

"These worms seem to be able to tolerate incredibly high concentrations of heavy metals, and the metals seem to be driving their evolution," said lead researcher Mark Hodson of the University of Reading in England.

"If you took an earthworm from the back of your garden and put it in these soils, it would die," Hodson said.

DNA analysis of lead-tolerant worms living at Cwmystwyth, Wales, show they belong to a newly evolved species that has yet to be named, he said.

Two other superworms, including an arsenic-munching population from southwest England, are also likely new to science, Hodson said.

"It's a good bet they are also different species, but we haven't categorically proved that," he said.

The findings were announced in September at the British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool.

Micro Processors

Hodson's team's investigation used x-rays to zap worms with intense light, allowing them to track metal particles a thousand times smaller than a grain of salt.

The findings suggest the arsenic-tolerant population produces a special protein that "wraps up the metal and keeps it inert and safe so it doesn't interact with the earthworms," Hodson said.

The toxicity of the metal particles once they have passed through the worms isn't yet known, since the protective protein wrappings will degrade over time, the study authors noted.

But experiments suggest the superworms make the metals easier for plants to extract from the soil, Hodson said.

"The earthworms don't necessarily render the metals less toxic, but they do seem to make them available for plant uptake," he said. This raises this possibility of using the earthworms as part of efforts to clean up land contaminated by mining and heavy industry.

Plant Mining

The long-term aim is to breed and then release the worms at polluted sites to speed up the process of soil development and help kick-start the ecosystem's rehabilitation, Hodson said.

Plants could be used to extract toxic metals once the superworms have got to work, he added.

This in turn could boost the development of methods for using plants to mine metals.

"The goal at the end of the rainbow is that the plants become so efficient at it that you can use them as a source of metal in industrial processes," Hodson said. "So you just crop off the plants and take them to a processing plant."

Peter Kille of the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University in Wales has also been tracking the metal-eating worms.

He said previous studies show it takes earthworms many years to improve polluted soils. While the new superworms should prove a useful tool, even they can't compete with industrial cleanup processes that take one to two years.

The worms, however, are an excellent way to diagnose metal concentrations in contaminated land, Kille said.

"Basically you can see the earthworms as biological dipsticks of the soil toxicity and the metal levels," he said.

And the superworms are perfect subjects for studying evolution in action, Kille added.

"What's really interesting is that each patch of high metal creates a unique evolutionary event," he said. The worms either develop new ways of dealing with the metals or find solutions similar to other populations.

"Each time it happens it's a localized event, and it allows us to study the processes of evolution that create the adaptation," he said.

Ozark Big-Eared Bat

Photograph by Merlin D. Tuttle/Bat Conservation-International Inc
The Ozark big-eared bat is an endangered species found only in a small number of caves in the southern central United States. Also known as the western big-eared bat, the long-eared bat, and the lump-nosed bat, its appearance is defined by a pair of outsize ears and a lump-adorned nose.

These bats, whose bodies are normally less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, have ears that extend more than an inch (2.5 centimeters) in length. Their ears are generally held erect, except during hibernation, when some bats coil them like ram’s horns.

Beyond the mythical ears, these bats have two distinctive facial glands on either side of their nose resembling a pair of mittens. Their fur is light to dark brown, and their bellies are tan. They have a sizeable wingspan as well, measuring some 12 to 13 inches (30 to 34 centimeters).

The Ozark big-eared bat feeds primarily on moths but may also eat other bugs in and around its forested hunting grounds. It makes its home in caves, relying on their protection during hibernation and maternity.

Mating among these bats is initiated with ritualized calls and affectionate head nuzzling. The female stores the male’s sperm until spring, when ovulation, fertilization, and gestation occur. A single baby, or pup, is born in May or June, already weighing one-fourth of an adult's body weight. Baby bats mature quickly becoming fully independent and able to fly within two months.

The Ozark big-eared bat once lived in caves in Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. However, they have apparently abandoned their Missouri habitat due to human encroachment and cave disturbance, and estimates put the remaining wild population at around 1,800. Conservationists are currently working to protect these numbers by minimizing human intrusions.

Astronaut's Diary Goes on Display in Jerusalem

By Shawna Ohm

The diary is being displayed as part of a larger exhibit of famous documents from Israel's history. Also on display will be Israel's 1948 declaration of independence, the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and a bloodstained sheet of paper with lyrics to a peace anthem that was carried by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of his assassination.
Pages from an Israeli astronaut's diary that survived the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia and a 37-mile fall to earth are going on display this weekend for the first time in Jerusalem.

The diary belonged to Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut and one of seven crew members killed when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere on Feb. 1, 2003. Part of the restored diary will be displayed at the Israel Museum beginning Sunday.

A little over two months after the shuttle explosion, NASA searchers found 37 pages from Ramon's diary, wet and crumpled, in a field just outside the U.S. town of Palestine, Texas. The diary survived extreme heat in the explosion, extreme atmospheric cold, and then "was attacked by microorganisms and insects" in the field where it fell, said museum curator Yigal Zalmona.

"It's almost a miracle that it survived -- it's incredible," Zalmona said. There is "no rational explanation" for how it was recovered when most of the shuttle was not, he said.

NASA officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. space agency returned the diary to Ramon's wife, Rona, who brought it to forensics experts at the Israel Museum and from the Israeli police. The diary took about a year to restore, Zalmona said, and it took police scientists about four more years to decipher the pages. About 80 percent of the text has been deciphered, and the rest remains unreadable, he said.

Two pages will be displayed. One contains notes written by Ramon, and the other is a copy of the Kiddush prayer, a blessing over wine that Jews recite on the Sabbath. Zalmona said Ramon copied the prayer into his diary so he could recite it on the space shuttle and have the blessing broadcast to Earth.

Most of the pages contain personal information which Ramon's wife did not wish to make public, he said.

"We agreed to do the restoration completely respecting the family's privacy and the sensitivity about how intimate the document is," museum director James Snyder said.

The diary provides no indication Ramon knew anything about potential problems on the shuttle. Columbia's wing was gashed by a chunk of fuel tank foam insulation at liftoff and broke up in flames just 16 minutes before it was scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. All seven astronauts on board were killed.

The diary is being displayed as part of a larger exhibit of famous documents from Israel's history, held to mark the country's 60th anniversary this year. Also on display will be Israel's 1948 declaration of independence, the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and a bloodstained sheet of paper with lyrics to a peace anthem that was carried by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of his assassination in 1995

Solar icemaker: get the sun to keep things cool for a change

Just when you thought ice cube-creation technology had peaked, a team of engineering students from San Jose State University has come up an ice maker that has zero carbon footprint. It’s more than an eco-party trick — consider it an electricity-free alternative to refrigeration and air conditioning, which is critical if you happen to be somewhere off of the electrical grid, like in the developing world or in a disaster zone.

It works like this: the solar icemaker uses a refrigerant liquid that evaporates when exposed to the sun. The vapor travels through pipes that come into contact an absorbent material, which cools when the sun goes down. Once the slow-cooling absorbent hits 104°F, the refrigerant turns back into a liquid and its temperature drops like a rock to below freezing because of pressure differences. Put some water next to the evaporator’s exterior and, presto, ice.

A typical icemaker uses electricity to run a compressor to do this work, but the solar icemaker just uses solar energy, with no moving parts. And the systems are sealed, so barring a leak, they'll never need replenishing. The icemaker makes about 14 pounds of ice per day — more than enough for the margaritas at your end-of-summer barbecue. The students' prototype isn't available yet, but maybe next summer….

http://www.engr.sjsu.edu/jrhee/solar/projects.htm

Right Whales

By Douglas H. Chadwick
Photograph by Brian Skerry
They dive 600 feet, brushing their heads along the seafloor with raised, wartlike patches of skin, sometimes swimming upside down, big as sunken galleons, hot-blooded and holding their breath in cold and utter darkness while the greatest tides on Earth surge by. Then they open their cavernous maws to let the currents sweep food straight in. This is one way North Atlantic right whales feed in the Bay of Fundy between Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Or so the experts suspect, having watched the 40- to 80-ton animals surface with mud on their crowns. Mind you, they say, that could result from another activity—one nobody can imagine yet.

Science calls these animals Eubalaena glacialis, "good, or true, whale of the ice." Heavy irony is embedded in the common name, right whale, given by whalers who declared them the right whales to kill. Favoring shallow coastal waters, they passed close to ports, swam slowly, and often lingered on the surface. Such traits made them easy to harpoon, and they tended to conveniently float after they died, thanks to their exceptionally thick blubber layer, which whalers rendered into oil. The first of the great whales to be hunted commercially, E. glacialis lit the lamps of the Old World from the Dark Ages through the Renaissance. By the 16th century Europeans had exhausted the eastern North Atlantic population and turned to North America's coast. There whalers set up stations in Labrador and took 25,000 to 40,000 related bowhead whales along with an unknown number of rights (records seldom distinguished between these two similar looking titans).

By the time New Englanders got into the right-whale-killing business, they were chasing leftovers. The Yankees hunted down another 5,000 or so, partly because whales became even more prized for their baleen than for oil. Hundreds of strips of this tough yet flexible material, each six to nine feet long and finely fringed, drape from the upper jaw. They form a colossal sieve that allows the giants to strain tiny crustaceans from the water for food—a billion flea-size copepods a day to supply the minimum 400,000 calories an adult whale needs (the ratio of a whale's body mass to its prey's is 50 billion to one). Society, however, thought baleen was best used for corset stays, stiffeners in fashionable gowns, umbrella ribs, and (consider: "I'm going to whale on you!") horsewhips.

As the 20th century began, the number of whales left in this species was possibly in the low dozens. Commercial harpooning wasn't banned until 1935. Their recovery since then might be compared to that of a human victim of a vicious assault: painfully slow progress, offset by relapses, with the ultimate outcome very uncertain.

About 350 to 400 North Atlantic right whales exist today. The survivors migrate along North America's East Coast between feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine and wintering sites farther south—roughly 1,400 miles one way for pregnant females that journey to traditional calving areas off Georgia and Florida. They travel through an intensely urban stretch of ocean.

A research team from Boston's New England Aquarium spends the summer stationed in Lubec, Maine, studying the whales that gather to feed and socialize in the Bay of Fundy and nearby Roseway Basin, off Nova Scotia's southern tip. The scientists, who have built an archive of around 390,000 photographs, can recognize nearly every whale in the population by its unique callosity pattern (those wartlike patches on their heads), along with scars and other irregularities, and, increasingly, DNA samples.

One of their favorites is #2223, first seen in these waters in 1992. It was a baby, and so fond of cavorting around boats that they named it Calvin after the mischief-loving cartoon kid. That same year a fisherman reported a calf circling its dying mother, and when the team recovered the carcass of the female, they identified her as #1223—Delilah, Calvin's mom. Her corpse revealed tissues crushed by a powerful collision, probably with one of the cargo carriers plying the shipping channel that used to run straight through the bay's center, where the whales concentrate. The eight-month-old calf 's prospects looked grim, for it should have been nursing Delilah's rich, warm milk for several more months.

In July 1993 researchers poring over fresh photos from the bay found images that looked like a match for Calvin's baby pictures. Yes! The orphan had somehow made it alone. DNA from a skin sample taken in 1994 showed that curious, hardy Calvin was in fact a girl whale. The following year brought the first report of her entering a surface-active group, or SAG, in which both sexes mingle with splashing, shoving, rolling, stroking signs of courtship. Though she wouldn't mature sexually until about ten years of age, subadults her age appear drawn to the excitement of SAGs and get to practice behavior that may soon influence their breeding success. Fertile adult females are the most valuable segment of the population. They number fewer than a hundred. Calvin seemed on the verge of adding one more to their ranks.

For three years running, the researchers gauged the young female's blubber thickness with ultrasound. It's a tricky operation. "One whale's reaction jolted the skiff hard enough to send me flying overboard," Amy Knowlton of the research team recalled. Nevertheless, the researchers found Calvin growing pleasingly plump, a prime measure of health. On New Year's Eve of 1999, she was recorded for the first time in the Georgia Bight, an expanse of shallow coastal waters off Georgia and Florida, where right whales give birth.

In summer of 2000 Calvin was once again in the Bay of Fundy, but this time she was snarled in fishing gear. Unbreakable polyblend ropes wrapped round her body, cut into the skin, and trailed in her wake, slowing her down. Then researchers lost sight of the young female.

Two to six right whales are found dead in a typical year, at least half of them killed by ship strikes or entanglement. Additional animals simply disappear. Since more than three-quarters of North Atlantic right whales bear scars from encounters with fishing gear, scientists wonder: How many of those missing are weighed down by ropes, nets, or crab and lobster pots for months or even years, the fat reserves that help keep them buoyant dwindling as they starve, fighting harder to reach the surface for each breath, until they finally give in to pain and exhaustion and sink?

Months dragged by. Someone finally spotted Calvin in Cape Cod Bay during her hobbled journey back south. A disentanglement team from nearby Provincetown, Massachusetts, raced for the site and made two attempts to slice away her bindings. They couldn't get them all, but when Calvin was seen during 2001, she had worked free of the remnants.

Three years passed, and Calvin showed up occasionally—but not in her usual summer haunts. Had the trauma sent her into a downward spiral? At the end of December 2004, near the North Carolina coast, she presented herself—with a brand new calf. Seven months later, in 2005, they were in the Bay of Fundy, where Delilah had brought Calvin as an infant.

The corridor traveled by Calvin and the other North Atlantic right whales has grown ever more crowded with fishing activities and busy shipping lanes. Plumes of contaminants flow from river mouths, and the underwater din of ship traffic probably makes it increasingly difficult for the whales to communicate and keep track of one another. Though not as visible as wounds from boat prows and propeller blades or fishing gear webbed around struggling bodies, heavy chemical and noise pollution may take a gradual toll.

During the 1980s the number of babies born annually was around 12. The total twice fell sharply in the 1990s until just a single calf appeared in 2000. Since then, the average has risen to more than 20 calves a year. Yet this remains 30 percent below the whales' potential rate of reproduction. Why? If scientists are to guide the species' salvation, they need more data and more answers. Fast.

One August morning in 2006, when the sea was a sheet of dimpled satin shot through with silver threads, I joined Scott Kraus, the New England Aquarium's vice president of research, and Rosalind Rolland, a veterinarian and senior scientist with the aquarium, on an unlikely quest in the Bay of Fundy. When leviathans rose in the distance through the sea's shimmering skin, Kraus steered the boat downwind of where they had briefly surfaced, handed me a data sheet to log our movements, and zigzagged into the faint breeze. Rolland moved onto the bow. Beside her was Fargo, the world's premier whale-poop-sniffing dog.

Fargo began to pace from starboard to port, nostrils flaring. Rolland focused on the rottweiler's tail. If it began to move, it would mean he had picked up a scent—and he could do that a nautical mile away. Twitch … Twitch … Wag, wag. "Starboard," Rolland called to Kraus. "A little more. Nope, too far. Turn to port. OK, he's back on it." A quarter of an hour ran by like the bay's currents. All I saw were clumps of seaweed. Suddenly, the dog sat and turned to fix Rolland with a look. We stopped, and out of the vast ocean horizon came a single chunk of digested whale chow, bobbing along mostly submerged, ready to sink from view or dissolve altogether within minutes.

Kraus grabbed the dip net and scooped up the fragrant blob. You'd have thought he was landing a fabulous fish. "At first, people are incredulous. Then come the inevitable jokes. But this," said the man who has led North Atlantic right whale research for three decades, "is actually some of the best science we've done."

With today's technology, DNA from sloughed-off intestinal cells in a dung sample can identify the individual that produced it. Residues of hormones tell Rolland about the whale's general condition, its reproductive state—mature? pregnant? lactating?—levels of stress, and presence of parasites.

Despite its low numbers, the North Atlantic right whale may not be the rarest of all the great whales. There may be no more than a few hundred North Pacific right whales, Eubalaena japonica, which were harpooned illegally by Soviet whalers as late as the 1960s. But on the other side of the Equator, the southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, has rebounded from a few hundred in the 19th century to at least 10,000. If its cousins along North America's East Coast are the urban whales, these giants of the Southern Hemisphere are the wild whales, and they offer a vision of what a safer future might be like for the other two right whale species.

After feeding in plankton-laden waters around Antarctica, the various populations of E. australis migrate to wintering areas near Argentina, southern Africa, western and southern Australia, and sub-Antarctic New Zealand. The species has been increasing at a rate of up to 7 percent annually. That's close to the maximum possible for whales that require a full year for pregnancy, devote at least one more to nursing, and another to fatten up, and therefore can produce an offspring only every third year.

In July 2007 Rolland, Kraus, and I joined a team bound for the Auckland Islands, 300 miles south of New Zealand through some of the planet's stormiest latitudes, to carry out census and DNA work. As our 82-foot sailboat Evohe slipped into a protected bay amid the isles, there was nothing but sunshine washing the deck. Then, like explorers of a bygone era, we watched natives paddle across the water to surround our vessel. Except these natives paddled with flukes and blew spray from their heads.

Curious right whales investigated Evohe for hours while yellow-eyed penguins leaped along like skipping stones beside them. Great breaths overrode the sounds of waves and seabird cries and the mewling of young New Zealand sea lions from rookeries ashore. More whales milled and breached for as far as we could see. They were bigger than northern rights. More than one in ten were pinto-patterned, flashing yards of smooth white skin. A bygone era? This was beginning to feel more like the dawn of creation. Rolland and Krause, who had never viewed a southern right before, were beside themselves.

"Omigod. That one right there is the fattest young whale I have ever seen." (When judging the condition of northern rights, the scientists pay special attention to the area just behind the blowhole, where the chubbier animals develop a bulge of blubber. Its size has proved to be an accurate predictor of survival.) "We don't even have a category for a whale with a fat roll that big."
They're so clean! Not a mark on them."

Over the next three weeks, hundreds arrived in succession to give birth and nurse pale-colored infants or churn the water in SAGs and compete for mates before heading back to the open sea. Gales blew from all directions—this was midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere—coating the hillsides with snow. Researchers beat through the waves in a skiff to take identification photos and collect skin samples with small, hollow-tipped darts so they could define the genetic makeup of this recovering population more closely. Glenn Dunshea, from Australia's Center for Applied Marine Mammal Science, was interested in telomeres—DNA sequences at the tips of chromosomes that gradually shorten throughout an animal's life. By studying them in right whales, which may live at least the better part of a century (their close cousins, bowheads, may reach two), he hopes to discover more about telomeres' role in the aging process. Wouldn't it be humbling if a map to the legendary fountain of youth lay hidden within creatures we almost exterminated?

Kraus and Rolland roamed in a second skiff to view and photograph the whales in order to conduct detailed visual health evaluations, which they could compare with those of troubled whale populations back home. They wore their usual happy-to-be-in-the-kingdom-of-giants glow, yet it was mixed with a touch of sadness. As Rolland put it, "We just saw more right whale calves in two hours than people will see all year in the whole North Atlantic."

Safeguarding wildlife, even in the globe's most remote places, gets harder all the time.

The southern whales are doing fine for now, but keeping them that way will require better protection of critical wintering areas and migration routes. Fishing gear drowns so many diving seabirds in far southern waters that several kinds of albatrosses are in desperate trouble. As fisheries and whale populations both expand, conflicts with whales can't be far off.

As for the whales of the North Atlantic, commercial fishing and marine transport are huge, vital industries, and modifying their operations along the entire eastern seaboard to protect a few hundred giants won't be easy or cheap. Yet scientists' models say that saving just two sexually mature females each year from being killed would change the trend for this endangered species from either downward or level to upward.

Posed that way, the problem doesn't sound so hard to solve. A network of aerial and vessel surveys augmented by a force of volunteers who keep a sharp eye out for these warm-blooded submarines stands ready to help.

The volunteer force includes fast-striding beachcombers, folks who gather for morning coffee and then drive from one overlook to the next, and residents who watch from the windows of their condos. There are also the few, the proud … the vertical team. They take elevators to the tops of the tallest buildings around and scan the ocean from a seagull's perspective.

Still other whale trackers take to the air. Volunteer pilot George Terwilliger flew the scientists who saw mothers and calves in the Georgia Bight in 1984; before then no one knew where the last of the North Atlantic right whales went to give birth. Terwilliger still flies two to three times a week, piloting an Air Cam aircraft specially designed for low-speed reconnaissance and photography.

Whether a surfacing whale is spied from shore, roof, or sky, the information is quickly phoned in via hotline to the Early Warning System, which transmits it to military and commercial mariners. When operators of commercial vessels over 300 gross tons enter right whale habitats, they must notify a Mandatory Ship Reporting System, which automatically provides information about recent sightings.

It's far from a perfect strategy. Ship captains don't have to slow down if they don't feel like it. The federal government recently cut funding for right whale conservation research. But nothing seems to dampen the volunteers' enthusiasm.

Standing on the boardwalk of a gated community in Florida, binoculars at the ready, Donna McCutchan said, "Most people in this development were like me. They had no idea whales winter here. Now everybody knows about them, and they know to call in if they spot one." McCutchan herself hadn't seen a whale for weeks. She didn't mind waiting, she said. "I once got to watch a mother roll onto her back, and bottlenose dolphins started jumping over her. Whales are addictive. Once you see them, you don't want them to leave. Ever."

Rare Mass Tombs Discovered Near Machu Picchu

José Orozco in Caracas, Venezuela

Eighty skeletons and stockpiles of textiles found in caves near the ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu may shed light on the role that the so-called lost city of the Inca played as a regional center of trade and power, scientists say.

Researchers found the artifacts and remains at two sites within the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park in southeastern Peru, said Fernando Astete, head of the park
The remains, most of which were found in May 2008 at a site called Salapunku, probably date to 500 to 550 years ago, said Francisco Huarcaya, the site's lead researcher.

Due to extensive looting, however, as much as 75 percent of the fabrics found wrapped around the remains are in "bad shape," Huarcaya said.

So far only the heads and shoulders of most of the bodies have been uncovered, Astete added.

"The head and shoulder bones are seen first, because the Inca buried their dead [sitting] in the fetal position," he explained.

Formal excavations will soon begin at both sites. Huarcaya plans to exhume the remains of five people at Salapunku later this month.

Tombs and Textiles

The modest funerary wrappings, made of vegetable fiber, and the simple grave objects, including unadorned ceramics, suggest that the dead unearthed at Salapunku were peasant farmers, Huarcaya said. Weavers have been found accompanied by their weaving baskets, balls of thread, looms, and textiles, according to Guillermo Cock, an expert on Andean cultures.

Cock has received funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)

Textiles found at the second site, called Qhanabamba, discovered in August 2008, may also provide clues to the social rank of the dead.

Peasants were more likely to have been buried with textiles made from llama wool, while wool of the vicuña—a relative of the llama—was reserved for nobility, said Astete, the park's director.

Human remains are rare near Machu Picchu, and the wet mountain climate makes textiles uncommon finds, said Cock, who was not part of the research team.

"Finding organic material in the mountains is significant because it's so scarce," he said. "The humidity from rain decomposes individuals and textiles."
Analysis of the bones should also reveal age at death, sex, cause of death, diet, and perhaps even the dead's occupations, Astete added.

"We should be able to tell whether these people carried large burdens to help construct terraces, for example. Their bones will be bent, not straight. They will have deformities," he explained.

"Bones will also tell us about their diets and diseases. A fracture would reveal an accident."

The burial of human remains held special significance for the Inca, added Huarcaya, the lead researcher.

"The remains in tombs are like the guardians of the population in Andean ideology," he said. "For [ancient Andeans], death does not exist."

Machu Picchu Revealed

Built around 1460, the city of Machu Picchu seems to have been abandoned after the Spanish conquest in the 1500s, though it was never found by the conquerors.

Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham brought Machu Picchu to worldwide attention after local Indians led him to the site in 1911.

The new discoveries promise to shed light on the mystery of the ancient city and its role within the Inca Empire, Cock said.

"We know Machu Picchu, but we don't know its surrounding areas," he said.

"I think new material will be found that will help us understand the Inca's relationship with the region."

Oldest Rocks on Earth Discovered

Oldest Rocks on Earth Discovered?
John Roach

An expanse of bedrock along Hudson Bay, Canada, may be a chunk of crust that formed not long after the solar system was born nearly five billion years ago, according to a new study.

The finding could push back the age of the most ancient remnant of stable crust on Earth by about 300 million years.
Previous research had dated rocks in northwestern Canada to 4.03 billion years ago, and tiny crystals of the mineral zircon in Western Australia are known to be upward of 4.38 billion years old.

It's not known whether the bedrock itself is also as old as the crust, a question that awaits further analysis, said study co-author Richard Carlson, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.

Regardless, the ancient date supports the once-controversial idea that Earth was cool enough to produce crust early in its history.

"Even though we expect the Earth formed [at] very hot [temperatures], at least Earth's surface had cooled down to temperatures … not dramatically hotter than today," Carlson said.

The finding disputes the idea that the first crust didn't form until a period of intense asteroid and comet bombardment ended about 3.8 billion years ago.

Dating Rocks

In 2007 Nicole Cates and Stephen Mojzsis of the University of Colorado at Boulder dated the Hudson Bay bedrock to about 3.8 billion years ago.

Their team based their estimate on the decay of radioactive uranium found in tiny shards of zircon taken from the bedrock. The technique is widely used to date ancient rocks around the world.
However, Jonathan O'Neil and Don Francis of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, later collected samples of the Hudson Bay rock that appeared to be even older than 3.8 billion years.

O'Neil worked with study co-author Carlson on the analysis of these rock samples, which had been intruded by the zircon-containing rock.

"So the unit we worked on had to be older than 3.8 [billion years old], but you didn't know if it wasn't 3.8 plus a day," Carlson said, noting that the samples lacked easily datable zircon crystals.

Instead, the researchers looked for variations in isotopes, or the atomic structures, of the rare earth metals samarium and neodymium.

One isotope of neodymium is formed from the decay of a samarium isotope that existed only at the beginning of the solar system.

The presence of that neodymium isotope in variable quantities and other clues revealed an age of 4.28 billion years, Carlson explained.

The study will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Caution Urged

University of Colorado's Mojzsis said the data used to reach the 4.28-billion-year-old date "meets the highest standards"—but he is unconvinced the rocks themselves are that old.

The rocks could be derived from 4.28-billion-year-old sediments, he noted, similar to rocks that form from pre-existing, older rocks.

"We need to be cautious about this and, frankly speaking, skeptical," he said.

Mojzsis added that he is currently looking for a rock in the Hudson Bay region that contains 4.28-billion-year-old zircon, which he said would help resolve the debate.

Mojzsis's research is funded, in part, by a grant from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research in Exploration. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)

If the rocks themselves are shown to be 4.28 billion years old, he added, they would represent the only known piece of crust that has survived from the Hadean, the earliest era of Earth's history.

Most pieces of Earth's crust have been mashed up, melted, and reformed time and again through the process of plate tectonics.

Pinpointing when Earth's crust-mantle and plate tectonics systems got underway remains an active area of geological research, Mojzsis added.

The Hudson Bay rocks, he said, reinforce the idea that the early Earth "was one that had dynamic rock cycling and volcanism and formation of crust from the earliest days."

Tutankhamun's with 5 mummies

More than 80 years after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities has stunned the world of Egyptology by revealing that another tomb has been found, just four metres away from Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

For a long time it was thought that the valley, opposite the modern city of Luxor and the source of many of the most famous discoveries, had given up all of its secrets.

The discovery was the work of a team of American archaeologists from the University of Memphis led by Otto Schaden.

"It's very, very exciting," said Patricia Podvorzski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis. "It was completely unexpected, so long after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Many archaeologists said the valley was done 100 years ago." Dr Schaden's find is the 63rd tomb to be opened in the valley.

The newly discovered 18th-dynasty tomb contains five mummies in intact sarcophagi with coloured funerary masks, along with more than 20 large storage jars sealed with pharaonic seals, according to Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The sarcophagi are carved in human form, like Tutankhamun's. The tomb is rectangular, and the wooden sarcophagi are surrounded by the jars, which seem to have been placed haphazardly, suggesting that the burial had been completed quickly, according to Dr Hawass.

Dr Schaden has been working in the valley on the Amenmesse Tomb Project, a minor tomb of the 19th dynasty, for many years. "They had finished clearing up that tomb and had started to dig down to the bedrock in front of the entrance," said Dr Podvorzski. "They were looking for foundation deposits - the models of tools, vessels and other things that were put around the tomb of a king to assure the permanence of the structure. While doing that they found workmen's huts made of dry stone and dating from the 19th dynasty. I believe they were in the process of dismantling the huts when they found the new tomb."

It was a very similar chain of events that led to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. That, too, had been covered by ancient workmen's huts. "That was why the tombs didn't get robbed," added Dr Podvorzski. "The ancient Egyptian tomb robbers saw the huts and assumed there was nothing underneath them."

Although the discovery came as a huge surprise, there had been a suspicion that something else might be found. "Some time ago a British team did remote sensing around the tomb and said they thought there might be something down there," said Dr Podvorzski.

Details of the find are expected to be announced officially by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities today, including possibly the identities of the occupants.

Kent Weeks, an American archaeologist, said the tomb was a single chamber, probably intended for a single mummy. Some or all of the other sarcophagi could have been put in later. He added that photographs of the tomb suggested it did not belong to a king. "It could be the tomb of a king's wife or son, or of a priest or court official," he said. "It clearly proves that the Valley of the Kings is still not exhausted. There are probably many more tombs to be found in it."

Whatever the new tomb may contain, its fate is certain: Egypt's policy on undisturbed tombs is clear. "This stuff will stay in Egypt," said Dr Podvorzski.

WHO IS JET MAN?

A former Air Force pilot, Yves Rossy has spent much of his career flying thousands of people around the planet as a captain for SWISS. But when Rossy is not flying planes, he is jumping out of them. Freestyle, skysurf, freely – you name it, he has done it. But no matter how daring, these adventure sports never fulfilled his childhood dream: to soar like a bird. Not with a glider, but with a propelled fixed wing. Appearing live on National Geographic Channel in Jet Man Live, Rossy will attempt to become the first person to cross the English Channel using a single, jet-propelled wing.

Rossy devotes all of his spare time to flying in the purest sense, carrying out more and more tests using equipment developed on a trial and error basis: an inflatable wing, which carried him over the 12 kilometres separating the Swiss and French banks of Lake Geneva, a paraglider and a surf board that sent him skimming through Geneva’s water fountain before spectacularly grabbing the handle of a water skier, and a skydiving adventure on a disc “above” the Matterhorn. Today, Rossy has become FusionMan, the first man in the world to attach jet engines to a single wing and fly.

Growing up with his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground, Rossy pursued a technical apprenticeship and then graduated in engineering. As a fighter pilot, discovering the Mirage III supersonic fighter plane was certainly one of the high points of Rossy’s career. He flew the aircraft for 15 years, and also piloted historic aircraft such as the Hunter and the Venom.

An accomplished sportsman, his past and present hobbies include surfing, water-skiing, wakeboarding, skysurfing, parachuting, aerobatics, motorbike riding, rafting and hang-gliding, to name but a few. Flying under a jet wing is the culmination of a 30-year career interspersed with exploits and firsts.

Yves Rossy was born on 27, August 1959, in Neuchatel, Switzerland. He speaks English, French and German fluently.