On June 29, 2010, Ankara, in a first sign of frustration, called on Iran to return "as soon as possible" to the negotiating table over a nuclear fuel swap deal. According to a senior Turkish diplomat, Turkey voted against tougher UN sanctions under the condition that Iran would engage itself in talks on its controversial nuclear program. However, on June 28, 2010 Ahmadinejad announced that any negotiations will be postponed until late August in order to "punish" Western powers. Tehran left it unclear when and if it will continue to talk with Brazil and Turkey, its two allies.
King Tut, the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt, has been puzzling scientists ever since his mummy- and treasure-packed tomb were discovered in 1922 the Valley of the Kings by British archaeologist Howard Carter.
Only a few facts about his life are known.
While he lived in Amarna, his name was Tutankhaton ("honoring Aton" -- the sun god).
When he ascended the throne in 1333 B.C., at the age of nine, and moved to Thebes, he changed his name to Tutankamun ("honoring Amun" -- a traditional cult).
He married 13-year-old Ankhesenpaaten, the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, on his accession to the throne and reigned until his death in 1325 B.C., aged 19.
He was a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, probably the greatest of the Egyptian royal families.
He has been believed to be either the son of the minor king Smenkhkare or the offspring of Amenhotep III, the father of the "heretic" pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 B.C.)
Another leading theory suggested that King Tut was sired by Akhenaten, the revolutionary pharoah who established the capital of his kingdom in Amarna, introducing a monotheistic religion that overthrew the pantheon of the gods to worship the sun god Aton.
Doubts also remain about King Tut's mother. Scholars have long debated whether he is the son of Kiya, Akhenaten's minor wife, or Queen Nefertiti, Akhenaten's other wife.
Evidence that Tutankhamun was the child of Akhenaten has come from an inscribed limestone block pieced together by Hawass in December 2008.
The block shows the young Tutankhamun and his wife, Ankhesenamun, seated together. The text identifies Tutankhamun as the "king's son of his body, Tutankhaten," and his wife as the "king's daughter of his body, Ankhesenaten.”
According to Hawass, "the only king to whom the text could refer as the father of both children is Akhenaten."
Egyptologists also debated whether two fetuses found in his tomb were the stillborn children of King Tut and his wife Ankhesenpaaten, who had changed her name to Ankhesenamun, or if they were placed in the tomb with the symbolic purpose of allowing the boy king to live as newborns in the afterlife.
A series of X-rays taken by British scientist Ronald Harrison in 1968 revealed a bone fragment in his skull, prompting speculation that a blow to the head killed the boy pharaoh.
In 2005 the mummy underwent a series of CT scans, which revealed that the fragments were not broken because of an injury incurred before death, but during the embalming process.
It also ruled out that the boy pharaoh crushed his chest when falling from his chariot, as suggested by American Egyptologist Denis Forbes.
While establishing that the boy king was about 1.70 metres (4 feet, 9 inches) tall, the CT scan showed that the king had a small cleft in his hard palette, the lower teeth slightly misaligned, and the overbite characteristic of other kings of from his family.
It rejected the diagnosis of an abnormal curvature of the spine and fusion of the upper vertebrae, which would have indicated King Tut suffered from a rare disorder called Klippel-Feil syndrome, a condition often associated with scoliosis which makes sufferers look as if they have a short neck.
The most important anomaly was a fracture of the left lower femur (thighbone). Some members of the team who examined the 17,000 images of the CT scan, suggested that King Tut suffered an accident in which he broke his leg badly, leaving an open wound, with infection setting in.
Other members of the team believed it was also possible that the fracture was caused by the embalmers.
In 2007, a black, leathery, shriveled and cracked King Tut emerged with a toothy smile from his sarcophagus, showing his face to the world for the first time.
The rest of the body, which despite restoration work carried out over the past two years resembles a badly burnt skeleton, remain covered with beige linen.
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'Intelligent' oil droplet navigates chemical maze by Colin Barras
There's some humbling news from the chemical world for anyone who has ever found themselves lost in a garden maze. A simple droplet of organic solvent can find its way through a complicated labyrinth with nothing more to go on than a slight pH difference.
Bartosz Grzybowski's team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, used a common polymer to fashion a two-dimensional labyrinth some 2 centimetres on each side. They then flooded the maze with strongly alkaline potassium hydroxide solution, before placing a hydrochloric acid-soaked chunk of gel at the maze exit.
After about 40 seconds they placed a droplet of mineral oil containing hexyldecanoic acid at the maze entrance. The oil, which cannot mix with the potassium hydroxide solution, sits on the surface. But it remains still only for a matter of seconds – it soon begins tearing around the maze at speeds of up to 10 millimetres per second, sniffing out the shortest path to the acid-soaked gel, and solving the maze in the process.
"In the movie files you can see the droplet makes decisions," says Grzybowski. "It goes left along the wrong path, decides there's something fishy with that and so it reverses. It looks almost alive."
But while Grzybowski says the droplet displays behaviour that might be called "primitive intelligence", there's a simple chemical mechanism at work.
The droplet leaches its acid into the surrounding solution, losing hydrogen ions in a process known as deprotonation – a process that affects the surface tension of the droplet itself.
"But to the front and rear of the droplet [the surrounding solution] has a different pH," he says, because of diffusion from the acid-soaked gel at the maze exit. Those tiny pH differences affect the amount of deprotonation that happens at the front and rear of the droplet, and this asymmetry sets up a surface tension gradient that forces the droplet into motion. "I would say the droplet is self-propellant," he says.
Grzybowski's team thinks that the behaviour could have implications for cancer treatments. They would like to develop micelles – aggregates of molecules such as balls of lipids – that can navigate pH gradients in the body. "A good reason for that is cancer is more acidic than the rest of the body," Grzybowski says.
But the chemical behaviour could also offer an explanation for the apparently intelligent behaviour of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, which 10 years ago was shown to possess similar maze-solving abilities by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, now at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
"The [new] finding is interesting since it gives an insight of possible physical mechanisms for Physarum to find a path in the maze," Nakagaki says.
Journal reference: Journal of the American Chemical Society, DOI: 10.1021/ja9076793
Some cool mazes for you to enjoy after reading this article....
Hallucamazenic Maze-A-Delic - Ink On Paper, Winter 2006,
by Yonatan Frimer
www.TeamOfMonkeys.com
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Maze of Liberty - 2009 - Yonatan Frimer
Which maze of the statue of liberty do you like better. The psychedelic one or the line art one? Answer with care down bellow in the comments. Thanks
Psychedelic Liberty Maze
A Chinese man who trained monkeys martial arts to entertain shoppers was shocked when they turned the tables on him.
Lo Wung's taekwondo monkeys have become a regular feature outside a shopping centre in Enshi, Hubei province, where they were trained to show off their martial arts skills on each other.
But one quick-thinking monkey saw his chance when Lo slipped - and caught him with a perfect flying kung fu kick to the head. The rest then joined in the affray.
Hu Luang, 32, who caught the incident on camera, said: "I saw one punch him in the eye - he grabbed another by the ear and it responded by grabbing his nose.
"They were leaping and jumping all over the place - it was better than a Bruce Lee film."
At one point the monkey trainer grabbed a staff to hit the monkeys, only to find himself facing a stick-brandishing monkey that cracked him over the head.
Lo only managed to get the monkeys under control by tangling them up in the rope that had been used to stop them running off.
