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in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings point to a hidden
chamber, the country’s antiquities minister said, possibly heralding the
discovery of Queen Nefertiti’s resting place.
“We can now
say that we have [possibly found] behind the burial chamber of King Tutankhamun
another chamber, another tomb,” Mamduh al-Damaty said at a press conference,
speaking in English.
He said
experts were “approximately 90 per cent” sure. The tests were spurred by a
study by renowned British archeologist Nicholas Reeves who said Nefertiti’s
lost tomb may be hidden in an adjoining chamber.
Speaking at
the same press conference, Reeves said the initial results could bear out his
theory.
“Clearly it
does look from the radar evidence as if the tomb continues, as I have
predicted,” he said.
“The radar,
behind the north wall [of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber] seems pretty clear. If
I am right it is a continuation — corridor continuation — of the tomb, which
will end in another burial chamber,” he said.
“It does
look indeed as if the tomb of Tutankhamun is a corridor tomb ... and it
continues beyond the decorated burial chamber,” he added.
“I think it
is Nefertiti and all the evidence points in that direction.” Damaty emphasised
that the findings were “preliminary” results, and a Japanese expert working
with the archaeologists needed a month to analyse the scans.
Experts
carried out a preliminary scan of the tomb earlier this month using infra-red
thermography to map out the temperature of its walls.
Damaty said
at that time that the analysis showed “differences in the temperatures
registered on different parts of the northern wall” of the tomb.
Nefertiti
played a major political and religious role in the 14th century BC. She
actively supported her husband Akhenaten — Tutankhamun’s father — who
temporarily converted ancient Egypt to monotheism by imposing the cult of sun
god Aton.
Her role in
the cult would have ruled out her burial in the Valley of the Kings according
to Zahi Hawass, the country’s former antiquities minister and expert on ancient
Egypt.
“Nefertiti
will never be buried in the Valley of the Kings,” he told AFP. “The lady was
worshipping Aton with Akhenaten for years. The priests would never allow her to
be buried in the Valley of the Kings,” he said.
Tutankhamun
died aged 19 in 1324BC after just nine years on the throne. His final resting
place was discovered by another British Egyptologist, Howard Carter, in 1922.
Legendary musician Ringo
Starr is “beyond blessed” to still be married to wife of nearly 35 years Barbara
Bach.
The former Beatles drummer met
the one-time Bond girl on the set of the film Caveman in 1980 and married a year
later. And after more than three decades together, their bond is stronger than
ever.
“There’s no escape … I think I
love Barbara as much (today) as I did (when we met),” he gushed to People
magazine. “And I’m beyond blessed that she loves me and we’re still together.”
Ringo, 75, performed on the
classic Beatles track All You Need is Love, and for Barbara there couldn’t be a
truer sentiment. “I love the man, and that’s it,” the 68-year-old added.
The pair has accumulated a lot of
belongings together and, having now settled in Los Angeles, they have decided to
sell off a lot of their precious memorabilia to raise money for
charity.
“It’s time to let go,” Ringo
explained.
Some of the items on sale include
a guitar given to Ringo by band mate John Lennon, and an outfit Barbara wore in
The Spy Who Loved Me opposite Roger Moore.
However, one of the biggest
sellers is sure to be the first ever copy of the band’s 1968 album, The Beatles
– more commonly known as the White Album due to its minimalist packaging.
Each unit of the record came with
its own serial number stamped on the cover and Ringo is the owner of White Album
No 0000001. Bidding on the record starts at $20,000 (£13,276), but it is
estimated to fetch up to $60,000 (£39,670).
The items will be up for auction
between 3-5 December (15) at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, with the
proceeds of the sales benefitting Barbara’s charity, the Lotus
Foundation.
Expect to hear a whole lot
more about Li-Fi - a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using
visible light communication (VLC) - in the coming months. With scientists
achieving speeds of 224 gigabits per second in the lab using Li-Fi earlier
this year, the potential for this
technology to change everything about the way we use the Internet is huge. And now, scientists have
taken Li-Fi out of the lab for the first time, trialling it in offices and
industrial environments in Tallinn, Estonia, reporting that they can achieve
data transmission at 1 GB per second - that's 100 times faster than
current average Wi-Fi speeds. "We are doing a few pilot
projects within different industries where we can utilise the VLC (visible light
communication) technology," Deepak Solanki, CEO of Estonian tech company,
Velmenni, told
IBTimes UK. "Currently we have designed a
smart lighting solution for an industrial environment where the data
communication is done through light. We are also doing a pilot project with a
private client where we are setting up a Li-Fi network to access the Internet in
their office space.” Li-Fi was invented by
Harald Haas from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland back
in 2011, when he demonstrated for the first time that by flickering the
light from a single LED, he could transmit far
more data than a cellular tower. Think back to that lab-based record of 224
gigabits per second - that's 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every
single second. The technology uses Visible Light
Communication (VLC), a medium that uses visible light between 400 and 800
terahertz (THz). It works basically like an incredibly advanced form of Morse
code - just like switching a torch on and off according to a certain pattern can
relay a secret message, flicking an LED on and off at extreme speeds can be used
to write and transmit things in binary code. And while you might be worried
about how all that flickering in an office environment would drive you crazy,
don’t worry - we’re talking LEDs that can be switched on and off at speeds
imperceptible to the naked eye. The benefits of Li-Fi over
Wi-Fi, other than potentially much faster speeds, is that because light cannot
pass through walls, it makes it a whole lot more secure, and as
Anthony Cuthbertson points out at IBTimes UK, this also means there's less interference between
devices. While Cuthbertson says Li-Fi will
probably not completely replace Wi-Fi in the coming decades, the two
technologies could be used together to achieve more efficient and secure
networks. Our homes, offices, and industry
buildings have already been fitted with infrastructure to provide Wi-Fi, and
ripping all of this out to replace it with Li-Fi technology isn’t particularly
feasible, so the idea is to retrofit the devices we have right now to work with
Li-Fi technology.
Research teams around the
world are working on just that. Li-Fi experts reported
for the The Conversation last month
that Haas and his team have launched PureLiFi, a company that offers a
plug-and-play application for secure wireless Internet access with a capacity of
11.5 MB per second, which is comparable to first generation Wi-Fi. And French
tech company Oledcomm is in the process of installing its own Li-Fi technology
in local hospitals. If applications like these
and the Velmenni trial in Estonia prove successful, we could achieve the dream
outlined by Haas in his 2011
TED talk below - everyone gaining
access to the Internet via LED light bulbs in their home. "All we need to do is fit a
small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would then
combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission,"
Haas
said. "In the future we will not only
have 14 billion light bulbs, we may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide
for a cleaner, greener, and even brighter future." By Bec Crew With many thanks to Science Alert
