Mereja

Author: Serkadis

  • Spider Silk Research




    There is a design principle suggested here that we need to think about.  The protein crystals are sized to optimize strength and ductility, and then weakly bound together in a way that is mutually supported.  This is almost the description of a rope.
    How it could be applied to materials engineering remains to be seen but it is suggestive.
    The promise of course is a clever combination that could be simply extruded into existence while setting up extraordinary strength.  Doing it better with materials at the macro level would be always welcome.
    Spider silk research could lead to new super-materials
    Making bricks from straw may soon be possible and even desirable after scientists found spider silk could make ordinary materials stronger than steel.
    By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

    Published: 14 Mar 2010
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7442243/Spider-silk-research-could-lead-to-new-super-materials.html
    Researchers found that spider silk employs a unique crystal structure that converts an otherwise weak material into one stronger and less brittle than steel or ceramics.
    They believe in future it may be possible to copy spider ingenuity to create new classes of materials that are both incredibly flexible and strong out of cheap, ordinary elements.
    Theoretically, they could even be made from wood, straw or hemp, say the scientists.
    Carbon-based materials made the same way would be even stronger than spider silk.
    A key property of spider silk is its combination of strength and “ductility” – its ability to bend or stretch without breaking.
    Most man-made materials, in contrast, sacrifice strength for ductility. Ceramics, for instance, are strong yet brittle.
    Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, studied the fundamental properties of spider silk using computer models to simulate its structure.
    The silk is made from proteins including some that form thin flat crystals called beta-sheets.
    The researchers found that the size of the crystals was critical.
    When they measured about three nanometres (three millionths of a millimetre) across they made the silk ultra-strong and ductile.
    But if the crystals grew to five nanometres the material became weak and brittle.
    Spider silk was strong despite its components being connected by naturally weak hydrogen chemical bonds, said the scientists.
    The geometry of the crystals allowed the hydrogen bonds to work co-operatively, shielding each other against external forces.
    The researchers, led by Professor Markus Buehler from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, wrote in the journal Nature Materials: “The application of our findings to the design of synthetic materials could provide us with new material concepts based on inexpensive, abundant constituents.”

  • Book review: Cleopatra – A biography

    New York Times (Tracy Lee Simmons)

    CLEOPATRA. A Biography
    By Duane W. Roller
    Oxford University Press

    As usual with popular modern book reviews for, part of the review is the summary of the story told by the book’s author. But the reviewer also comments on the way in which the book was written:

    Roller tells his tale smoothly and accessibly. Scholarly digressions are consigned to helpful appendixes that Roller uses as small seminars for airing points of dispute, as a good many remain. What, for example, were the origins of Cleopatra’s mother? Was Cleopatra — the quintessentially vile foreigner according to Octavian’s propaganda — a Roman citizen? (Roller believes she was.) And he offers a digest of classical literary descriptions of the queen and a discussion of her iconography (including coin portraits, which are the only certain likenesses) to pinpoint those elements of her modern identity that only evidence from the period can prove or support.

    The resulting portrait is that of a complex, many-sided figure, a potent Hellenistic ruler who could move the tillers of power as skillfully as any man, and one far and nobly removed from the “constructed icon” of popular imagination.

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Travel: What to do with children in Egypt

    Egypt Today (John Prosser)

    A look at some of the educational and entertaining areas of Cairo that might keep your children engaged on holiday.

    A fitting place to begin your family’s academic adventures is Dr. Hassan Ragab’s Pharaonic Village. Visitors are transported 4,000 years back in time to a painstakingly recreated pharaonic civilization. As you take a canal-boat tour through the village — complete with rare plants and animals believed to have lived in the region thousands of years ago — actors in period clothing demonstrate ancient methods of cultivation, ship-building and fishing. Museums on the island cover all aspects of ancient Egyptian life; from the building of the Sphinx and the pyramids to the production of papyrus. There’s even a museum explaining how chocolate was discovered and used, with free samples of cocoa of course. With new exhibits constantly being added, the Pharaonic Village is worthy of repeat visits. The village is located on Jacob Island, off the west bank of the Nile about six kilometers south of downtown. Guided tours last from one to three-and-a-half hours, depending on your desired itinerary, with prices starting at $15 (LE 83) per person.

    A more traditional venue for learning about ancient Egyptian culture now also has a great alternative for kids. The children’s gallery at the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, (after coming through the main gate, follow signs round to the left of the main building) teaches children the ways of ancient life through the medium of Lego.

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Sequoia Fiery Tree Rings







    This is good to see.  More important is the last bit about the impact of man driven fire control on reproduction.  It is clearly not good at all.
    I have already posted on this subject and this is yet another great example.
    Best practice for almost all forests is the introduction of timed and controlled burns.  We have plenty of data and plenty of need to implement such programs everywhere.  They are clearly necessary for forest health, to say nothing about other parts of the biome.
    The huge burns that ran rampant a couple of years back was a combination of a decadal drought and a great manmade fuel build up.  The fuel must be reduced.  No one understands quite how much fuel hits a forest floor every year.  In the East it rots slowly and is blanketed with moisture holding leaves.  The Indians still burned it all out.
    In the West it tends to get tinder dry.  Walking through a ponderosa pine forest in July is a bit like passing through a gas filled house.  Only a madman would light a match and the forestry department orders folks out.  It really is that obvious.
    In the long run and we actually have the time, what I am saying here is been said by others and this is slowly working its way into text books and study programs.  In time proscribed burns will be done everywhere and in time stakeholders will optimize forests for maximum long term productivity.
    Today we can recognize the problem and tomorrow we can implement proper changes.  Enough knowledge already exists to assure us that most new changes will be for the better.   The sequoias can wait for us to get our act together.
    EARTH’S BIGGEST TREE RINGS TELL FIERY TALES

     Fifty-two giant fallen giant sequoias reveal a 3,000-year-old history of fire and drought after giant chainsaws expose their rings.
    By Larry O’Hanlon | Mon Mar 29, 2010
    http://news.discovery.com/earth/giant-sequoia-tree-rings.html
    Using huge chainsaws and strong backs, the largest trees in the world are finally giving up their 3,000-yearrecord of fires and droughts. No trees, however, were harmed in the making of this fire history.
    “We only used dead trees,” emphasized tree ringresearcher Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona. Swetnam led the study that was reported in a recent issue of the journal Fire Ecology. “We spent multiple years collecting the wood and hauling it back to Tucson.”
    The giant sequoias in California‘s Sequoia National Park are far too thick to be cored for the extraction of the pencil-thin cores typically used by tree ring researchers. So the authors of a new report on tree ring evidence of past droughts and fires used all sorts of other tools to slice and dice 52 giant dead and fallen sequoias, lug the pieces back to roads by hand. Then they spent years piecing together the valuable history in their laboratories.
    Among the things they found in the ring record was a very dry and fiery period from 800 to 1300 A.D. That corresponds to a controversial climate interval called the Medieval Warm Period.
    That period was very dry,” said Swetnam. “But we’re not so clear how warm it was.”
    Modern temperatures already exceed those of the Medieval Warm Period, said Swetnam. So if heat has anything to do with fire frequency, we could expect more fires.
    “What makes this work unique is that it goes so far back in time,” said U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Nathan Stephenson, who has spent a lot of years studying sequoias. Usually if you are working with pines you get centuries. With these you get multi-millennial annual resolution records.”
    But unlike a tree ring history that’s based on just rings, this one is based cross dating rings between various trees the dating of fire scars.
    These scars happen during natural fires when debris close to the tree bakes and burns the trunk, which is otherwise fire resistant. The trees can grow over a lot of these scars, but in cross sections, that can be easily spotted and dated.
    “That way were able to establish a fire chronology,” Swetnam told Discovery News. Of course, there have been other fire chronologies. Some are based, for instance, on charcoal layers found in mountain lakes. But nothing has quite the resolution of tree rings.
    “The punch line from all of this,” said Stephenson, “Is that over at least 2,000 years the most severe (sequoia) reproduction reduction has been in the last 100 years. Human land use changes have had greater effect than the preceding 2,000 years of changing fire regimes.”
    The problem, said Stephenson, is fire suppression. Excluding fires from the sequoia groves, makes it very difficult for sequoia seeds to germinate or have enough space for saplings to get started.

  • Book review: Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe-VIIIe siècles)

    Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Review by Shawn W.J. Keough)

    Ewa Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe-VIIIe siècles). JJP supplement 11. Varsovie: Journal of Juristic Papyrology, 2009.
    Ewa Wipszycka’s first contribution to the study of Egyptian monasticism appeared in 1986, and for the past twenty-five years a steady stream of articles from her pen has left its significant imprint on the field and firmly established her reputation as one of the world’s preeminent specialists of the institutional and social history of late antique Egyptian Christianity. The book everywhere bears the mark of a specialist intimately acquainted with an enormous range of source material: Wipszycka skilfully combines the skills of historian, papyrologist and archaeologist, a rare feat. The result is a volume that presents an incredibly detailed description and analysis of Egyptian monastic institutions and communities in which the social conditions and lived realities of late antique monastic centres flanking the Nile are presented in all their fascinating diversity and complexity. Only one previously published essay appears unchanged within this book marking the culmination of a quarter century’s research, while more than fifteen previous studies have been revised, updated and incorporated into the volume, much of which presents new material.

    The volume opens with a lengthy introduction to and consideration of the literary sources undergirding Wipszycka’s study. As the volume is not so much concerned with monastic spirituality or theological controversy as with the social circumstances of Egyptian monastic centres, certain texts appear rarely, if at all (such as the writings of Evagrius of Pontus).

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • The vizier’s door

    Al Ahram Wekkly (Nevine El-Aref)

    According to Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), the door, which is 175cm tall, 100cm wide and 50cm thick, is engraved with religious texts as well as User’s various titles: the mayor of the city; vizier; and inheriting prince.

    User is believed to have come to office in the fifth year of Hatshepsut’s reign. He built a tomb for himself and his wife on the west bank at Luxor (number 61). Mansour Boreik, supervisor of Luxor antiquities and head of the excavation team, said the newly-discovered door was cut from the tomb during the Roman period and used as part of a wall found several months ago by the mission.

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Chemistry Discovery for Cooking Oil



    This does not sound like it is going to be used any time soon but it is surely suggestive and the protocol is possibly repeatable with other solvents.  Certainly the idea of mixing a switchable solvent into an oil rich mash to effectively collect the oil and then switching it off to repel the remainder wet mash is as energy efficient as one may imagine.
    How it all may work in a process environment is certainly going to be a challenge.
    It certainly is promising and could be important were un processed mash is preferred for the benefit of future processing.  Here they are working with soy beans and even here it is likely too soon.
    Chemistry Discovery May Revolutionize Cooking Oil Production
    by Staff Writers

    London, UK (SPX) Apr 01, 2010

    When carbon dioxide is added, the solvent becomes hydrophilic, meaning it mixes with water and doesn’t like to be in oil. So when carbonated water – carbon dioxide and water – is added to a mixture of the solvent and soybeans, the oil is extracted out of the soybeans and collected. When the carbon dioxide is removed, the solvent switches back to its hydrophobic state.

    A Queen’s University chemistry professor has invented a special solvent that may make cooking oil production more environmentally friendly. Philip Jessop, Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry, has created a solvent that – when combined with carbon dioxide – extracts oil from soybeans.

    Industries currently make cooking oils using hexane, a cheap, flammable solvent that is a neurotoxin and creates smog. The process also involves distillation, which uses large amounts of energy.
    “Carbon dioxide is famous for global warming – it’s everybody’s favourite gas to hate these days,” says Professor Jessop, who specializes in green chemistry. “My research group is trying to figure out if we can use it for something useful. I figure we may not be able to recycle all the carbon dioxide out there but we can recycle a bit of it and make it contribute to society in a positive way.”
    Jessop’s new method of making oil involves a “switchable” solvent. This solvent is hydrophobic, meaning it mixes with oils and doesn’t like water.
    But when carbon dioxide is added, the solvent becomes hydrophilic, meaning it mixes with water and doesn’t like to be in oil. So when carbonated water – carbon dioxide and water – is added to a mixture of the solvent and soybeans, the oil is extracted out of the soybeans and collected. When the carbon dioxide is removed, the solvent switches back to its hydrophobic state.
    “The water and the solvent can be used again so everything is recycled. The end result is you have extracted soybean oil and there is no energy-consuming distillation required,” says Professor Jessop, who who did research in the 1990s under the supervision of Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Ryoji Noyori.
    While this process has only been done in labs, Professor Jessop says he has already heard from cooking oil companies and GreenCentre Canada who are interested in his research. But the solvent is still years away before it can ever be used in large-scale oil manufacturing.
    Professor Jessop is trying to get rid of the use of volatile chemicals such as hexane by giving industries an option to use a manufacturing process that is both economically and environmentally friendly.
    “The advantage of hexane is that it’s cheap. When you do green chemistry, you have to worry about cost. You can’t just say ‘Look at this, industry, it’s greener!’ If it costs 10 times as much, no one is going to use it,” Professor Jessop says. “So next we have to do the economic calculations to see how much it is going to cost. If manufacturing with this environmentally friendly solvent is really expensive compared to the hexane, we have to figure out how we can we make it cheaper.”
    The results of Jessop’s research have been published in the journal Green Chemistry.

  • April/May edition Ancient Egypt Magazine now available

    The April/May 2010 issue of “Ancient Egypt” magazine (published in the U.K.) is now available.

    If you are not a subscriber, you can do so online and the magazine is also available as an electronic version. Visit www.ancientegyptmagazine.com

    To celebrate our 10th year of publication any new subscribers will be offered one free issue of the magazine with their subscription, and subscribing is cheaper than buying the magazine from newsstands.

    Our online version may be useful for anyone with a broadband connection who may have difficulty in getting hold of a paper copy of the magazine, or who might want to see a copy before subscribing.

    Contents of the April issue includes;

    • News from Egypt and the World of Egyptology: Another bumper report ‘From our Egypt Correspondent’ brings the latest news and information – you won’t find this anywhere else!. This issue includes reports on new work in and around Alexandria, Giza, Saqqara and Luxor and with an update of the conservation and cleaning work at the temple of Hathor at Dendera.

    • An Alabaster Coffin and Sety I’s Last Secret: Stephen Cross looks at the alabaster coffin of the king, now in a museum in London and finds that the circumstances surrounding its discovery may indicate that the king’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings has more secrets to be revealed. This article is timely as the latest news from the valley indicates that a new discovery has indeed just been made.

    • Thoroughly Modern Mummies: Dr. Ryan Metcalfe reveals how modern science is helping us learn more about the mummification techniques used by ancient Egyptians and the reasons why their methods worked.

    • Amarna Update:: A brief update on the last season of work and developments at the site of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s city of Akhetaten.

    • Life in Paradise: Tombs of the Nobles at Thebes: An extract from Dr. Zahi Hawass’s new book on the Theban Tombs reveals many tombs unknown to the general public but superbly decorated.

    • The Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum: In the first of a series of articles on the work of the Department, Dr. Daniel Antoine looks at “Life and Death in the Nile Valley: Bioarchaeological Research at the British Museum”.

    • Tutankhamun’s family revealed by DNA Testing: The results of the recent DNA and CT scanning of a group of royal mummies, confirming/providing the identification of some of the mummies.

    • PerMesut: in our regular feature for younger readers, Hilary Wilson looks at “A sense of Smell”.

    • Net Fishing: our regular look at Egyptology on the Web, tracing the history of ancient Egypt. This issue Victor Blunden looks at the dual reigns Kings and High Priests in the Twenty-first Dynasty.


    Coming articles include:-

    • New excavations in the tombs of the Nobles at Luxor
    • An Ancient Egyptian Fleet of Model Boats now in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
    • Minoans and Mycenaeans in ancient Egypt.
    • Travellers in Egypt’s Western Desert
    • Ancient Egyptian boats: Exhibitions and a modern replica sailing in the wake of Hatshepsut.
    • Vetinary practice in ancient Egypt.
    • King Narmer’s Electric Catfish: a biological battery.

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interactions Vol 2, 2010

    No website available, so I guess the only way you’re going to be able to access this is via an academic library because I cannot even find subscription details. Do correct me if I’m wrong.

    Contents include:

    Ptolemy II Philadelphus and the Dionysiac Model of Political Authority
    Michael Goyette

    Who is Meddling in Egypt’s Affairs? The Identity of the Asiatics in the Elephantine Stela of Setnakht and the Historicity of the Medinet Habu Asiatic War Reliefs
    Dan’el Kahn

    The Amarna Letters from Tyre as a Source for Understanding Atenism and Imperial Administration
    Luis Robert Siddall

    A review of “The Aramaic and Egyptian Legal Traditions at Elephantine: An Egyptological Approach”
    Nikolaos Lazaridis

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Short biography of William Flinders Petrie

    Humanities blog

    Is there any well known archaeologist who hasn’t been compared to Indiana Jones? Sigh.

    The exhibition “Egypt excavations” will be presented at the Institute in Flint Flint, Michigan until January 2007. The show will be about 200 of the most significant finds of archaeologist Sir William Petrie display. . . .

    William Matthew Flinders Petrie was born in Charlton, Kent in 1853. His father was a surveyor and engineer, his mother was interested in fossils and other scientific topics. Both parents encouraged young William to interests that would eventually flourish to pursue a successful career. It is interesting that because of his poor health he was educated at home and received no formal schooling.

    As a child he was fascinated and interested to measure things. Hemeasured buildings, churches, ruins and even as Stonehenge. Because his father was a surveyor William learned about the importance of accuracy in measurements. When he was thirteen years old, he declared that he would one day visit to the Pyramids. He was at the time, inspired by reading our heritage to the Great Pyramids of Piazzi Smyth.

    Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

  • Intel Realizes No One Is Going To Confuse A Newsletter About Mexico With Its Processors

    Last year, we wrote about Intel’s trademark lawyers getting over aggressive in suing the owners of the Mexico Watch newsletter for using the domain name LatinIntel.com In this case, it was clear that “intel” was the commonly abbreviated version of “intelligence,” and no one was going to be confused and think that a newsletter about Mexico had anything to do with a company making microprocessors. For whatever reason, it appears that common sense has finally prevailed, and we’ve been alerted to the fact that Intel has dropped its lawsuit:




    Of course, a simpler course of action would have been to have not sued in the first place…

    Permalink | Comments | Email This Story





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