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A few people can argue against the fact that Valentino Rossi had plenty of bad luck during this week’s projected testing session with Ferrari. The reigning MotoGP champion began his second and last day of testing with the Scuderia on the Circuit de Catalunya venue with high hopes, yet he didn’t get to test the Ferrari F2008 for a single lap in the early hours of Thursday.

According to the Italian team’s official site, the morning session of the Corse Clienti meeting in Barcelona was heavily a… (read more)

drhawass.com

Press Release. Here’s an extract. There are more details and photos on the above page.

The most important tomb is the one belonging to Idu. It is rectangular in structure with a mud brick outside casing covered with plaster. It has several burial shafts cased with white limestone, as well as niches in front of each shaft.

Adel Okasha, supervisor of the excavation, said that the upper part of Idu’s tomb had a vaulted shape, symbolizing the eternal hill from which the human creation began, according to the Memphis religious tradition. This shape, said Okasha, is strong evidence that this tomb dates to the early 4th Dynasty. This shape is also similar to those of tombs located beside Snefru’s pyramid in Dahshur.

On the western side of Idu’s tomb, the mission uncovered another collection of workmen’s tombs as well as the remains of coffins, while on its southern side another large tomb has been found. It is a rectangular shaped tomb built of mud brick with several burial shafts, each one containing a bent skeleton along with sherds of clay.

Evidence uncovered also revealed that the families in the Delta and Upper Egypt sent 21 cattle and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the workers. Hawass pointed out that the families who sent these were not paying their taxes to the Egyptian government, but rather they were sharing in one of Egypt’s national projects. The number of workers did not exceeded 10,000, said Hawass, contradictory to Herodotus, who recorded that the number of workers reached 100,000.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Japanese carmaker Toyota has secured a lithium supply contract in Argentina through one of its business arms, Toyota Tsusho Corp., as Reuters writes.

Toyota Tsusho Corp, a trading company partially owned by the carmaker, stated that it would develop the Lithium Project in Argentina with Orocobre. The project is estimated to cost around $80-$100 million, Orocobre spokesman Paul Ryan told Reuters.

As electric or hybrid vehicles become more and more important on the auto market, the demand fo… (read more)

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Himalayan Glacier Data, Lorne Gunter

Hot on the heels of Climategate — the leaking of thousands of emails and computer files that show many of the world’s leading climate scientists fudging the results of their global warming research and contriving to keep skeptics from being published in academic journals — comes what could be called Glaciergate.

Prominent among the claims of impending environmental disaster in the UN’s fourth report on climate change, published in 2007, was the prediction that all of the 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by 2035. That’s just 25 years away. Now the Times of London has discovered that this claim was not based on scientific enquiry, but rather on speculation. And old speculation at that.

In 1999 the magazine The New Scientist interviewed an Indian climatologist named Syed Hasnain. He told reporter Fred Pearce that it was his “speculation” that the Himalayan glaciers would “vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming.” Dr. Hasnain cautioned that the data on which his speculation was based had neither been published nor peer reviewed, Mr. Pearce noted his in his article.

Source: nationalpost.com

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Measurements of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) were carried out by the JRC’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES) within the framework of the environmental assessment of European waste and sustainable use of resources. Emission factors were provided for POPs’ from three specific activities in developing countries, where no data had previously been available: brick production, open cooking with biomass and the use of simple stoves. A study on the impact of brick production on nearby soil quality was also included. Final reporting will be made through EU reports, which will be published on the webpage of the Stockholm Convention Secretariat.

Egypt State Information Service

President Hosni Mubarak will inaugurate a project to refurbish the ram road in the ancient Upper Egyptian archaeological city of Luxor in March, a project that should turn the city into an open outdoor museum.

Luxor Governor Samir Farag made the statements during a meeting with Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif.

Farag posted Prime Minister on a plan to install surveillance cameras across Luxor to help protect the city. It will be the first electronically-secured city in Egypt, Farag said, noting that the project will be completed within a year.

The governor also reviewed a blueprint to turn Luxor into an environment-friendly city, replacing petrol and diesel oil with natural gas. This also includes a programme to turn to solar energy in the city.

Farag said that Luxor will attract more tourists as an environment-friendly city, especially amid growing international awareness of the ecosystem.

Projects to upgrade the Luxor walkway, the Luxor Temple, the Karnak Temple and the Rams Road were also probed.

Slowly but surely, Luxor is gaining a position on the map of international sports and cultural events.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Although most companies brought their latest goodies at the 2010 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, some others are trying to set their models apart from the rest of the industry by showcasing the cars at various shows across the world.

The best example comes directly from South Korea as Kia will showcase at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show the new Ray concept car. Just as motorauthority.com writes, the car will come in the form of a plug-in concept that will benefit from the addit… (read more)

Article Tags: Walter Cunningham

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a series by scientist/astronaut Walter Cunningham, pilot of the Apollo 7 space mission, who has a master’s degree in physics. Cunningham has served on the Advisory Board for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory

There is a war going on between those who believe human activities are responsible for global warming and those who don’t. Contrary to the way the debate is often framed by the media, those who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) do not hold the high ground, scientifically. Their critics do.

Reason, Evidence Ignored

One reason for belief in AGW is the sad state of scientific literacy in the United States today. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found 25 percent of Americans did not know the Earth revolves around the sun. Such widespread ignorance leaves our society vulnerable to the emotional appeal of AGW alarmists.

Among AGW true believers, advocacy has replaced objective evaluation of data, and scientific data–regardless of the authority of its source or importance in the debate– are ignored and suppressed, or the messengers are attacked.

Source: heartland.org

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A test that could help identify the next generation of entrepreneurs has been devised by an academic at Kingston University in South West London. As well as spotting students who are more likely to start their own business, the Attitudes to Enterprise test also aims to find out which young people show a flair for self-employed enterprise or through running their own community project. Researcher Rosemary Athayde of Kingston’s Small Business Research Centre developed the test to find budding business leaders among school pupils aged 15-18 and to evaluate whether schemes for young entrepreneurs had any impact on pupils’ ambitions. She has also adapted the test to suit undergraduates…

Tags: Entrepreneurs,
Kingston University

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168 out of the 2,000 dealers rejected by American manufacturer GM had filed for arbitration by last Friday, according to GM spokeswoman Ryndee Carney talking to Autonews. They all have until next Monday to declare their intent to seek arbitration under the law adopted last week.

The other American manufacturer to have slashed dealers as a result of its restructuring efforts, Chrysler, has not provided any figure on how many of the 789 dealers which had been declared expandable.

We don’t w… (read more)

KPBS

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Editorial, Himalayan Glacier Data

With climate-change sceptics waiting to pounce on any scientific uncertainties, researchers need a sophisticated strategy for communication.

Climate science, like any active field of research, has some major gaps in understanding (see page 284). Yet the political stakes have grown so high in this field, and the public discourse has become so heated, that climate researchers find it hard to talk openly about those gaps. The small coterie of individuals who deny humanity’s influence on climate will try to use any perceived flaw in the evidence to discredit the entire picture. So how can researchers honestly describe the uncertainty in their work without it being misconstrued?

The e-mails leaked last year from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, UK, painted a picture of scientists grappling with this question, sometimes awkwardly. Some of the researchers’ online discussion reflected a pervasive climate of suspicion — their sense that any findings they released to the public could and would be distorted by sceptics.

Click soure to read FULL report (subs)

Source: nature.com

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Heritage Key

With slideshow.

Discovered inside the Tomb of King Tutankhamun, inside black resin-covered wooden shrines which were accessible via double doors, were 34 ritual figures. Of significant importance during the ritual ceremony, these statuettes are believed to assist the King Tut’s passage to the afterlife. Upon discovering the shrines in KV62, the great explorer Howard Carter found only one of the boxes had been raided by tomb robbers, with the rest laying undisturbed since antiquity. The ritual figures are now housed inside Cairo’s Egyptian Museum and have been captured on film by Sandro Vannini, who has photographed Egypt’s greatest treasures including the famous Golden Mask of King Tutankhamun.

The greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century, the inspiring tale of how Carter and his financier Lord Carnarvon uncovered the treasures of King Tutankhamun by working together is told by their modern day descendants the Earl and Countess in a video interview with Heritage Key (Watch this video).

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

John Iley might have failed in securing Ferrari a race-winning machine back in 2009, but he seems good enough for McLaren Mercedes for the upcoming campaign of Formula One. According to a McLaren spokesman confirming to the Reuters news agency, Iley has already started work at the Woking factory earlier this month.

Iley was ousted by Ferrari midway through last season, when the Scuderia officials figured out that the F60 was a complete failure from an aerodynamic standpoint. Iley was then hea… (read more)

Google Wave may not be the hottest thing in the tech world at the moment after a slightly disappointing wider roll-out, but that may be a good thing as the team can now focus on improving the service for the users that matter, the ones that actually have a use for Wave rather than treat it like the latest novelty item and expect it to fix… (read more)

Following Google’s momentous news last October about free turn-by-turn navigation on Android phones, Nokia’s just now abolished the price-tag for 74 countries. That’s 73 more than Google offers it to. And even better news—it’s available now.

You’ll need a Nokia phone with Ovi Maps (which runs on Navteq’s digital mapping, who Nokia bought out in 2008), for getting free drive and walk navigation; maps updates; and events, Lonely Planet and Michelin guides. Currently it’s only available on the X6, N97 Mini, E72, E55, E52, 6730 Classic, 6710 Navigator, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Navigation Edition and the 5230.

If you’ve got one of those phones, hit up Nokia over here and download it now. Let us know how you get on with it—supposedly it works offline? [Nokia Maps via Nokia Conversations]