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A team of archaeologists unearthed two large red granite statues in southern Egypt at the mortuary temple of one of the most powerful pharaohs, who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, the Culture Ministry said Tuesday. A ministry statement said the team discovered a 13 foot (4 meter) statue of Thoth, the ancient god of wisdom and the top part of a statue of Pharaoh Amenhotep III standing next to another god. Both were found buried in the pharaoh's mortuary temple on the west bank of the Nile in the southern temple city of Luxor.

1,600-year-old St. Anthony's Monastery restoration took eight years to complete. The announcement comes a month after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in over a decade. Amid the renovations, archaeologists discovered the remains of the original monk cells dating to the 4th century.

A bejeweled mummy dressed in Roman robes has emerged from the sands of Egypt's Bahariya Oasis, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Monday. Entombed in a decorated gypsum sarcophagus, the 38-inch tall mummy  belonged to a woman or girl who died in the Greco-Roman period about 2,300 years ago. Unearthed in a rock-hewn tomb at a modern construction site near the town of Bawiti, in Bahariya Oasis, some 185 miles southwest of Cairo, the mummy points to the existence of a large Greco-Roman necropolis nearby, Mahmoud Affifi, director of Cairo and Giza antiquities, said in a statement.

Superconductivity is one of those nearly magical properties that seem to defy all intuition for how the physical world ought to work. In a superconductor, electric currents flow without resistance—an electron passes unimpeded through the material like a torpedo through some frictionless ocean. After discovering the phenomenon in 1911 Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes showed that an electric current in a closed superconducting loop of mercury would keep flowing long after the driving potential was removed; he demonstrated his discovery by carrying such a persistent current from the Netherlands to England. Since then physicists have discovered superconductors based on other metals and even ceramics. The latest entry is one rooted in a hydrocarbon, which superconducts at a relatively high temperature compared with elemental metals.

Experimental microbial fuel cells could turn bacteria into batteries that generate electricity from biomass. The key to this technology is the ability of bacteria to transfer electrons to their surroundings—for example, to the anode of a microbial fuel cell. But if the organisms have to be in direct contact with the anode, such devices would have to have extremely large surface areas. Researchers from Aarhus University, in Denmark, report today in the journal Nature that bacteria appear to conduct electricity while separated by several millimeters, at least a thousand times as far apart than previously demonstrated. The naturally occurring electric currents, if confirmed, would allow bacteria spaced at least 12 millimeters apart to communicate electrically. The discovery might lead to new paths to treating infection and a better understanding of microbial ecosystems.

The moving parts of micromechanical machines tend to seize up under the forces of sticking and friction that engineers call stiction. The problem yields to solid lubricants, notably graphite (sheets of carbon atoms called graphene stacked in layers), although for a long time no one understood exactly why this happens. Now nanotechnology researchers, led by Professor Robert Carpick at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor James Hone at Columbia University, in New York City, have shown that how effective the lubrication is depends on the number of layers of graphene in the graphite. In particular, more layers means better lubrication. Because the same relationship between layers and lubrication occurs in thin sheets of molybdenum disulfide, niobium diselenide, and boron nitride—materials of widely differing properties—the workers conclude that this behavior is a fundamental aspect of friction. They expect that the discovery will lead to better lubrication of tiny moving parts. The researchers published details of their experiments in a recent issue of Science.

Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.