=== King Tut’s Space Bug ===
Among the treasures found in Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the 1920s one diminutive ornament poses a mystery that spans the ages. The “pectoral,” a kind of jewelry worn on one’s chest depicts Egyptian symbols with gold and gems. Most strikingly, at the piece’s center is a beetle carved from an ethereal yellow-green material. Originally, archaeologists identified the beetle as chalcedony, a quartz gemstone. In 1996, mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele noticed the beetle at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and suspected it wasn’t chalcedony. After studying the beetle, he determined it to be 28.5-million-year-old glass. De Michele then traced the glass to the Great Sand Sea of western Egypt, where pieces of it lay strewn across 6,500 square kilometers. Glass is made by heating substances, such as sand. Though lava and lightning strikes can create glass the desert glass’s traces of the elements iridium and osmium pointed to an unearthly culprit: a meteoroid. It’s true that the tremendous heat and pressure around the globe of meteorite impacts in many places have created glass. But meteorites leave craters, and there was no crater that could account for the desert glass. In recent years, scientists John Wasson and Mark Boslough have put their research-whiz brains to work on a new explanation for the desert glass. Intrigued by the 1994 collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter and a 1908 meteoroid airburst over a remote region of Russia that flattened 80 million trees but left no crater, they ran sophisticated computer simulations. Their conclusion: a meteoroid burned up in the atmosphere, but its fireball reached Earth and scorched an expanse of sandstone to temperatures above 1,800°C. Imagination can take the story through there. Some three thousand years ago, an artisan admired a piece of desert glass; so gorgeous that, with a little carving, it would befit a great pharaoh.
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ted vaguely, H. scream, because J. scream because, expecting her to share in my horror. This time, the tentacles unfolded from the windows of a large yellow house. I covered my eyes, and Rhonda said, “Louise. It’s just an art installation.” I peered through my fingers as she told me that Andrew Anderson, a local artist 9, had created the pink kraken. I had to 25. At this point, the writer is considering adding the following accurate information: admit that the kraken looked kind of friendly up close. who spent five years in Istanbul, Turkey Should the writer make this addition here?
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g art by American Indians. Representative of Howe’s style at the time, the painting featured sharp, angular shapes in rich pink, blue, and purple hues that geometrically depicted five dancers.
=== In Tune ===
Every April, North Carolina’s Louisburg College, normally only humming with students, welcomes a whistling crew for the weeklong International Whistlers Convention.