Night at the Museum - 1 - Egypt

Here a film showing some statues you can see visiting the Egyptian Museum, Torino

In occasion of the Winter Olympic Games, Torino 2006, the exibition space of the  Museum hosting the statues gained a new stage design created by Dante Ferretti (two times awared by the Academy for Best Art Direction).  Visitors entering the room were  plunged in a dark space where only the statues were lighted. Dark walls and mirrors on them, background music of flutes with the rattling of a sistrum, created a suggestive feeling of being in Egypt.

The Merowe Dam on the Nile

The artificial lake (reservoir) created by the Merowe Dam on the Nile has been photographed by the crew of the International Space Station. This image is recent, dating 5 October 2010. The dam is on the Nile near the Fourth Cataract, in that part of Nubia desert where the river Nile is creating the Great Bend, a contorted path through the bedrocks of Bayuda Massif. The satellite imagery of Google Maps, which is a few years old, shows the region, when the dam was under construction. Using Google, we see the Nile and river banks creating a fertile strip of land with many villages. 
We can compare the region before and after the spill gates have been closed.
Comparison shows that the lake created itself through the paleochannes, the old dry riverbeds. 


More at

http://porto.polito.it/2379391/1/http_www.archaeogate_con_immagini_revised.pdf
https://sites.google.com/site/merowedamsatelliteimagery/

Human, All Too Human - 1 - New

The sequencing of the nuclear genome from an ancient finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows that the cave dwellers were neither Neanderthals nor modern humans.
An international team of researchers led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) has sequenced the nuclear genome from a finger bone of an extinct hominin that is at least 30,000 years old and was excavated by archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, Russia, in 2008.
Read more
http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/12/2010/siberian-human-sheds-new-light-on-our-origins

The thermal rectifier

From Wiki: A thermal rectifier is a device that preferentially passes heat in one direction; a "one-way valve" for heat. The name is by analogy with an electrical rectifier, which performs a similar function for electric current.

More information
Experiments:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24222/
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1153
Theory
http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/michel.peyrard/ARTICLES/eplrectif.pdf