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4,000-Year-Old Tomb of Egyptian Queen Found Near Cairo

Tomb
© AFPA handout picture released by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities on 03 Mar 2010, shows the tomb of Queen Behenu which was discovered by a French archaeological team in Saqqara, about 35 kms south
Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed what they say is the 4,000-year-old sarcophagus of a mysterious ancient Egyptian queen.

A French team discovered the stone coffin in a burial ground, or necropolis, at Saqqara, south of the capital Cairo.

Egyptian experts say the burial chamber included ancient texts, or hieroglyphics, identifying the coffin as belonging to Queen Behenu. The inscriptions also included prayers meant to ease her passage to the afterlife.

The French team leader, Philippe Collombert, says it is not clear if Queen Behenu was the wife of 6th Dynasty rulers Pepi I or Pepi II. During that period, Egypt's Old Kingdom collapsed, bringing an end to the king's centralized power.

Network

Spanish police arrest masterminds of 'massive' botnet

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Spanish police have revealed that they have arrested three men responsible for one of the world's biggest networks of virus-infected computers.

All are Spanish citizens with no criminal records and limited hacking skills.

It is estimated that the so-called Mariposa botnet was made up of nearly 13 million computers in 190 countries. It included PCs inside more than half of Fortune 1000 companies and more than 40 major banks, investigators said.

The criminals have so far only been identified by their internet names, netkairo, aged 31, johnyloleante, aged 30 and ostiator, 25. Other arrests may follow, the investigators believe.

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A measure for the multiverse

Multiverse
© New ScientistGetting the measure of the multiverse
When cosmologist George Ellis turned 70 last year, his friends held a party to celebrate. There were speeches and drinks and canapés aplenty to honour the theorist from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who is regarded as one of the world's leading experts on general relativity. But there the similarity to most parties ends.

For a start, Ellis's celebration at the University of Oxford lasted for three days and the guest list was made up entirely of physicists, astronomers and philosophers of science. They had gathered to debate what Ellis considers the most dangerous idea in science: the suggestion that our universe is but a tiny part of an unimaginably large and diverse multiverse.

To the dismay of Ellis and many of his colleagues, the multiverse has developed rapidly from a being merely a speculative idea to a theory verging on respectability. There are good reasons why. Several strands of theoretical physics - quantum mechanics, string theory and cosmic inflation - seem to converge on the idea that our universe is only one among an infinite and ever-growing assemblage of disconnected bubble universes.

What's more, the multiverse offers a plausible answer to what has become an infuriatingly slippery question: why does the quantity of dark energy in the universe have the extraordinarily unlikely value that it does? No theory of our universe has been able to explain it. But if there are countless universes out there beyond our cosmic horizon, each with its own value for the quantity of dark energy it contains, the value we observe becomes not just probable but inevitable.

Despite the many virtues of the multiverse, Ellis is far from alone in finding it a dangerous idea. The main cause for alarm is the fact that it postulates the existence of a multitude of unobservable universes, making the whole idea untestable. If something as fundamental as this is untestable, says Ellis, the foundations of science itself are undermined.

Meteor

Ancient Impact Hammered Northern Hemisphere

Plankton
© POWER AND SYRED / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYThe crash at the end of the Cretaceous period doomed important planktonic plants.
The extraterrestrial body that slammed into Earth 65 million years ago is best known for killing off the dinosaurs. But it also snuffed out more than 90% of the tiny plankton species that made up the base of the food web in the oceans. By sifting through geological records of ancient sediments from around the globe, palaeoceanographers have culled clues about how the impact caused so much havoc.

The researchers report in Nature Geoscience1 today that the most severe extinctions of nannoplankton happened in the northern oceans and that the ecosystems there took 300,000 years to recover, much longer than in the south. Given that pattern, the researchers speculate that the direction of the impact caused long-lasting darkness in the Northern Hemisphere and metal-poisoning in the northern oceans.

Nannoplankton with calcium-based shells were the primary photosynthetic producers in the oceans until 65 million years ago, at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Palaeogene periods. But 93% of those species went extinct - along with ammonites, large marine reptiles such as the plesiosaurs, and all the dinosaurs. The extinctions have been linked to the Chicxulub impact crater, which is buried beneath the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.

Sherlock

Fossils of Snake Eating Dino Eggs Found in India

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© AP Photo/Monica WilsonField assistant Shiva Rathore carries two recently excavated sauropod eggs back to a truck in at Gujarat, central India.
The fossilized remains of a 67 million-year-old snake found coiled around a dinosaur egg offer rare insight into the ancient reptile's dining habits and evolution, scientists said Tuesday.

The findings, which appeared in Tuesday's issue of the PLoS Biology journal, provide the first evidence that the 11.5-foot- (3.5-meter-) long snake fed on eggs and hatchlings of saurapod dinosaurs, meaning it was one of the few predators to prey on the long-necked herbivores.

They also suggest that, as early as 100 million years ago, snakes were developing mobile jaws similar to those of today's large-mouthed snakes, including vipers and boas.

"This is an early, well preserved snake, and it is doing something. We are capturing it's behavior," said University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, who is credited with recognizing the snake bones amid the crushed dinosaur eggs and bones of hatchlings.

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Ancient DNA Suggests Polar Bears Evolved Recently

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© Tom Brakefield/Getty ImagesGenetic analyses of a fossil unearthed on an island far north of Norway’s mainland suggest that the polar bear, Ursus maritimus, evolved a mere 150,000 years ago.
Rare fossil shows creatures are most closely related to modern-day brown bears in Alaska

The polar bear probably evolved no more than 150,000 years ago and is most closely related to brown bears that now live in southeastern Alaska, new genetic analyses of a rare fossil suggest.

Ursus maritimus, the polar bear, is a specialized predator that - ignoring the bears that forage for garbage in towns and villages along the Arctic coast - hunts solely on sea ice.

Several previous studies agreed that polar bears are closely related to brown bears but provided widely divergent answers about when polar bears first evolved, with estimates ranging between 70,000 and 1 million years ago, says Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Now, genetic analyses of material from a fossil first described two years ago narrow the window when the huge white bears first appeared, Lindqvist and her colleagues report in a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Laptop

Baby DVDs fail to boost word power: 'Baby Einstein' show could do more harm than good

baby einstein
© AlamyWarning: Parents who show their babies educational DVDs may actually be harming their word skills.
Parents who buy educational DVDs to give their toddlers a head start may be doing more harm than good.

A study of almost 100 boys and girls aged between one and two found that regularly watching a DVD from the Baby Einstein range did nothing to boost their vocabulary.

In fact, the younger the children were when they began to watch the programmes, the worse their word power.

Researchers tested the children over six weeks. Half were given a Baby Wordsworth DVD, which their parents were told to play 15 times over six weeks.

The 35-minute disc, costing around £18, is part of the Baby Einstein range - popular with parents keen to boost toddlers' IQs before starting school.

It uses puppets and people to introduce 30 words for rooms and household appliances, including 'fridge' and 'phone'.

The remaining children's parents were told to 'go about life as normal'.

Not surprisingly, older children picked up more new words than younger ones, the
California University team found. However, those who watched the DVD did no better than the others, and in fact appeared to learn little or nothing, their parents told Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, an American journal.

Pharoah

Statue head of King Tut's grandfather found in Luxor

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© Egypt's Antiquities DepartmentA picture released by Egypt's Antiquities Department on February 28, 2010 shows a 3,000 year-old red granite head of King Amenhotep III. Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue head of the pharaoh whom DNA tests revealed last week was King Tutankhamun's grandfather, the government has said.
Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue head of the pharaoh whom DNA tests revealed last week was King Tutankhamun's grandfather, the government said on Sunday.

The red granite head of King Amenhotep III, part of a larger 3,000 year-old statue, was discovered at the site of the pharaoh's funerary temple in Luxor, Egypt's culture ministry said in a statement.

"The newly discovered head is intact and measures 2.5 metres (8.2 foot) high," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass was quoted as saying.

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Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered

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© Dr. Robert MasonOne of the corbelled stone structures found in the Syrian desert. Archaeologists suspect that its an ancient stone tomb. In the front of it are the remains of a stone circle.
For Dr. Robert Mason, an archaeologist with the Royal Ontario Museum, it all began with a walk last summer. Mason conducts work at the Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery, out in the Syrian Desert. Finds from the monastery, which is still in use today by monks, date mainly to the medieval period and include some beautiful frescoes.

Dr. Mason explains that he "went for a walk" into the eastern perimeter of the site - an area that hasn't been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it's likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East's Neolithic Period - a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC - 4300 BC.

It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe.

Fish

Scientists rethink old whale tales

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© unknown
A 500-year-old right whale bone discovered deep in the frigid waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is shedding new light on the demise of one of the world's most endangered marine mammals.

With fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales alive today, experts have long believed that the species first ran into serious trouble with the arrival of Basque whalers from Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. They harpooned them by the thousands off the coast of Labrador, mainly for their oil.

But research on ancient whale bones, including one found near a sunken 16th century Basque galleon, is rewriting the animals' history, suggesting there may not have been as many right whales as previously estimated, even before commercial whalers took their devastating toll.

As a result, researchers are left with a puzzle, trying to figure out what - if anything - caused the initial right whale population crash.