Desert Roads Lead to Discovery in Egypt

Over the last two decades, John Coleman Darnell and his wife, Deborah, hiked and drove caravan tracks west of the Nile from the monuments of Thebes, at present-day Luxor. These and other desolate roads, beaten hard by millennial human and donkey traffic, only seemed to lead to nowhere.
In the practice of what they call desert-road archaeology, the Darnells found pottery and ruins where soldiers, merchants and other travelers camped in the time of the pharaohs. On a limestone cliff at a crossroads, they came upon a tableau of scenes and symbols, some of the earliest documentation of Egyptian history. Elsewhere, they discovered inscriptions considered to be one of the first examples of alphabetic writing.

The explorations of the Theban Desert Road Survey, a Yale University project co-directed by the Darnells, called attention to the previously underappreciated significance of caravan routes and oasis settlements in Egyptian antiquity. And two weeks ago, the Egyptian government announced what may be the survey’s most spectacular find.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the archaeologists had uncovered extensive remains of a settlement — apparently an administrative, economic and military center — that flourished more than 3,500 years ago in the western desert 110 miles west of Luxor and 300 miles south of Cairo. No such urban center so early in history had ever been found in the forbidding desert.

Dr. John Darnell, a professor of Egyptology at Yale, said in an interview last week that the discovery could rewrite the history of a little-known period in Egypt’s past and the role played by desert oases, those islands of springs and palms and fertility, in the civilization’s revival from a dark crisis. Other archaeologists not involved in the research said the findings were impressive and, once a more detailed formal report is published, will be sure to stir scholars’ stew pots.

The 218-acre site is at Kharga Oasis, a string of well-watered areas in a 60-mile-long north-south depression in the limestone plateau that spreads across the desert. The oasis is at the terminus of the ancient Girga Road from Thebes and its intersection with other roads from the north and the south.

A decade ago, the Darnells spotted hints of an outpost from the time of Persian rule in the sixth century B.C. at the oasis in the vicinity of a temple. “A temple wouldn’t be where it was if this area hadn’t been of some strategic importance,” Ms. Darnell, also trained in Egyptology, said in an interview.

Then she began picking up pieces of pottery predating the temple. Some ceramics were imports from the Nile Valley or as far away as Nubia, south of Egypt, but many were local products. Evidence of “really large-scale ceramic production,” Ms. Darnell noted, “is something you wouldn’t find unless there was a settlement here with a permanent population, not just seasonal and temporary.”

Feast of Data on BPA Plastic Yields Few Answers

The research has been going on for more than 10 years. Studies number in the hundreds. Millions of dollars have been spent. But government health officials still cannot decide whether the chemical bisphenol-A, or BPA, a component of some plastics, is safe. The substance lines most food and drink cans, and is used to make hard, clear plastic bottles, containers and countless other products. Nearly everyone is exposed to it.
Concerns about BPA stem from studies in lab animals and cell cultures showing it can mimic the hormone estrogen. It is considered an “endocrine disruptor,” a term applied to chemicals that can act like hormones. But whether it does any harm in people is unclear.

Where science has left a void, politics and marketing have rushed in. A fierce debate has resulted, with one side dismissing the whole idea of endocrine disruptors as junk science and the other regarding BPA as part of a chemical stew that threatens public health.

About half a dozen states have banned BPA in children’s products, and Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to accomplish the same nationwide, with an amendment to the food safety bill scheduled for a vote in the Senate next week.

This year, a presidential panel on cancer and the environment said there was a “growing link” between BPA and several diseases, including cancer, and recommended ways to avoid BPA, like storing water in bottles free of it and not microwaving food in plastic containers. Some cancer experts said the report overstated the case against chemicals, but the concerns it raised seemed to reflect growing public worries.

Eternal black holes are the ultimate cosmic safes

If you wanted to hide something away for all eternity, where could you put it? Black holes might seem like a safe bet, but Stephen Hawking famously calculated that they leak radiation, and most physicists now think that this radiation contains information about their contents. Now, there may be a way to make an "eternal" black hole that would act as the ultimate cosmic lockbox.

The recipe for this unlikely object was discovered by looking at an even more abstruse entity, the white hole. White holes are black holes that run backwards in time, throwing out matter instead of sucking it in. Where a black hole might form from a collapsing star, a white hole would explode and leave a star in its place. White holes have never been observed, though general relativity predicts they could exist in principle.

Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon in Eugene wanted to caculate whether a white hole would emit radiation like a black hole. He considered the special case of a white hole sitting in a perfect vacuum, and calculated that when it spits out its contents, there is a burst of radiation essentially identical to a black hole's Hawking radiation

Swarming spacecraft to self-destruct for greater good

uture space probes that operate in cooperative swarms must commit hara-kiri if they begin to fail and risk damaging their comrades, says a recent patent application by NASA.

The agency foresees a day when space missions are undertaken not by one large spacecraft but by swarming formations of much smaller, cheaper ones. Such craft could collectively provide a "floating optics" system for a space telescope comprising separate craft flying in formation, for instance.

However, should one spacecraft in such a swarm begin to fail and risk a calamitous collision with another, it must sense its end is nigh and put itself on a course that takes it forever away from the swarm – for the greater good of the collective.

Failing that – perhaps because it has too little fuel to move – it must "passivate" itself by deactivating all its systems. This would mean discharging its batteries so as to pose no risk of shock in a collision, and venting any last vestiges of fuel that could explode in a crash. Then its neighbours would be programmed to navigate around the lifeless satellite.

Locust brains could thwart superbug plagues

Extracts from the brains of locusts and cockroaches can kill hospital superbugs. Work is under way to identify the active ingredients, which could ultimately result in the first antibiotics originating from insects.

Nine distinct chemical extracts from the locust brain killed Escherichia coli, which can cause food poisoning, and seven killed Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the problematic superbug sweeping hospitals and communities throughout the western world.

Researchers screened brains, along with other tissues, for antibacterial activity on the grounds that the brain is the most vital organ for locusts to protect. "Without [the brain] they die, whereas they can survive losing limbs such as legs," says Simon Lee of the University of Nottingham, UK. "From the locust's point of view, it's important that the central nervous system is protected all the time against bacteria and other pathogens," he says. As he expected, only brain extracts were active.

Lee is currently conducting further analyses to identify the active components of the extracts, thought to be proteins because they stopped working when exposed to protein-degrading enzymes. He has also shown that the extracts don't harm human cells. "But we're a long way from these being active drugs," he says.

What can deliver snakebite medicine where it's needed?

SNAKEBITE is one of the world's most neglected health issues. In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a "neglected tropical disease". Yet this devastating problem is ignored by governments, research funders and public health organisations, leaving millions without adequate treatment.

In allowing this tragic situation to exist, governments are not only ignoring persuasive moral and economic reasons to improve treatment, but may also be in violation of legal obligations to provide access to antivenom.

The extent of the problem is difficult to quantify, but the WHO estimates there are 5 million cases annually worldwide, with up to half of victims experiencing effects from venom. Snakebites cause at least 100,000 deaths and up to 400,000 amputations each year. Millions more are bitten by spiders, scorpions and other venomous creatures, also without access to adequate medical care.

It is probable that snakebite causes more deaths and disability than many other tropical diseases, including dengue fever, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis (The Lancet, vol 375, p 89). Despite this, snakebite treatment programmes receive little public health funding and struggle to attract the research effort and political resolve necessary to improve treatment options.

Antivenoms are a proven approach to reducing death and disability from snakebites, but safe and effective sources are in decline. In many parts of the developing world, access to antivenom is virtually impossible. Even where it is available it is sometimes not used, or used inappropriately, because of inadequate experience and a lack of equipment to administer it.

CERN collides with a patent reality

You might imagine that vast patent royalties flow into the organisation that invented the touchscreen and the World Wide Web. But the atom-smashing outfit CERN, cradle of both these technologies, doesn't make a bean from either.

The particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has been reluctant to patent the inventions it creates in pursuit of exotic subatomic entities. But it hopes that will soon change: last week, it struck a deal with the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to ensure that it profits better from its engineers' innovations in fields like imaging, computing, particle detection and superconducting magnets, says international relations adviser Maurizio Bona.

CERN owes its historic aversion to patenting to its 20 European member states, says spokesman James Gillies. They pump millions of euros into the organisation every year to help develop new technologies – and don't want to have to pay to use the inventions in their own country. "So we have to square a circle: how do we protect the technology without double-billing member states?"

Thank mothers for large ape brains

Humans, apes and monkeys have their mothers to thank for their large brains.

It takes a lot of energy to make and run a brain, so large ones should only have developed in animals with fast metabolisms. But according to Vera Weisbecker of the University of Cambridge and Anjali Goswami of University College London, that's only part of the story.

The pair looked at the brains of 197 marsupials and 457 placental mammals, and could find a link between metabolic rate and brain size only in placental mammals. This suggests that parenting strategies play a key role.

"Placental babies are connected to their mothers via the placenta for a long time," says Weisbecker. "So if she has a high metabolic rate, the baby is more likely to benefit." By contrast, marsupial babies are born while they are still very small, then spend a long time feeding off their mothers' milk – a slower way to grow a large brain. Placentas offer a continuous supply of rich nutrients.

However, the pair found no difference in the average brain sizes of marsupials and placental mammals – as long as they excluded primates. These, it seem, got their disproportionately large brains from a double maternal boost. They are supplied with large amounts of energy by their mothers during gestation, and then receive additional months or even years of care after birth.

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