Piercing blue eyes undimmed by the passing of 1,300 years, this is the Lady of the Mask – a mummy whose discovery could reveal the secrets of a lost culture. She was found by archaeologists excavating a pyramid in Peru’s capital city Lima, alongside two other adult mummies and the sacrificial remains of a child. It is the first time a tomb from the region’s Wari culture has been discovered intact and gives historians the chance to pin down exactly how the pre-Incas buried their dead. The mummy - assumed to be a noblewoman because of the ornate mask - was found in a crouching position surrounded by ceramics and textiles associated with female weavers. “Her face startled me at first,” said 19-year-old Miguel Angel, one of the workers who carried her body out of the tomb. “I wasn’t expecting to find anything like that.” Earlier in the week, workers at the Huaca Pucllana site removed two adult mummies found lying near the lady of...

Parts of a giant, exquisitely carved marble sculpture depicting the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius have been found at an archaeological site in Turkey. Fragments of the statue were unearthed at the ancient city of Sagalassos. So far the statue's head, right arm and lower legs have been discovered, high in the mountains of southern Turkey. Marcus Aurelius was portrayed by Richard Harris in the Oscar-winning 2000 film Gladiator and was one of the so-called "Five Good Emperors". He reigned from 161AD until his death in 180AD. In addition to his deeds as emperor, Marcus Aurelius is remembered for his writings, and is considered one of the foremost Stoic philosophers. The partial statue was unearthed in the largest room at Sagalassos's Roman baths. The cross-shaped room measures 1,250 sq m (13,500 sq ft), is covered in mosaics and was probably used as a frigidarium - a room with a cold pool which Romans could sink...

Faith is probably the human race’s most endearing quality. Faith in God, faith in our children and even faith in our own ability. No matter how often our faith lets us down, we can always have faith that things can only get better. Just look at Tony Blair, after his anus horribilis of 2006, here he is, two years on, picking up mega bucks for after dinner speaking gigs, and no doubt secretly gloating over how much better things were with him in power. He may be too humble to confirm whether any mutual praying went on with him and George Dubya, but he has always had incredible faith, in both himself and in his creator. I think he’s the Pope now. Science doesn’t deal in faith, it deals in facts. Verifiable, catalogued, corroborated facts. But science is always behind the pace. New techniques are developed every day, new theories superseding old ones, new reputations to forge in the media. 100 years ago the latest scientific process...

Ongoing analysis on the mummified remains of two female fetuses buried in the tomb of Tutankhamun will most likely show that at least one of the stillborn children is the offspring of the teenage pharaoh, a scientist who carried serological analysis on the mummified remains told Discovery News. "I studied one of the mummies, the larger one, back in 1979 [and] determined the blood group data from this baby mummy and compared it with my 1969 blood grouping of Tutankhamun. "The results confirmed that this larger fetus could indeed be the daughter of Tutankhamen," said Robert Connolly, senior lecturer in physical anthropology from the University of Liverpool's Department of Human Anatomy and Cell Biology. The fetuses have been stored at the Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine since archaeologist Howard Carter first discovered them in Tutankhamun's tomb on the west bank of Luxor, Egypt in 1922....

Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot to be controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday. Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers said. "The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects. Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and...

For centuries, stories have been told about the height of the pyramids and the gaze of the Sphinx. As time progressed, hieroglyphs were deciphered, tombs and temples discovered, and often surprising discoveries, like the intact tomb of Tutankhamun, were added to the list of what was deemed to be Egypt’s unique appeal. But one “Holy Grail” of Egyptology has always evaded detection: the labyrinth. The labyrinth was said to be more impressive than any of these other monuments, and it is alas a fact that the labyrinth is now totally destroyed – or still hidden by the desert’s sands, waiting to be discovered. Erich von Däniken believes that the labyrinth is “waiting for a modern-day Heinrich Schliemann.” The question is therefore whether the Holy Grail of Egyptology will ever be attained, or is forever lost. It was the Greek traveller and historian Herodotus who, in Book II of his “Histories”, described a building complex in Egypt,...

More than 100 elaborate carvings dating back thousands of years have been discovered on rocks and boulders in the North of England. The Neolithic art - found at several sites across Durham and Northumberland - includes a series of intricate designs of concentric circles, interlocking rings and hollowed cups. They are among only 2,500 examples which exist in England - having survived natural erosion, quarrying and field clearance. Around 100 volunteers, trained by English Heritage, have been recording the location, content, context and condition of rock art for the last four years as part of pilot project. The most interesting discovery includes a large carved panel found on a sandstone boulder on Barningham Moor, a 300m-high (984ft) area of Co Durham, on the edge of the Pennines. It features abstract carvings — interlocking grooves and hollowed cups with surrounding circles. Tools of stone or bone were used to carve the symbols...

A mummy of a middle-aged woman dating to Ancient Greek times has been discovered in a lead coffin inside a marble sarcophagus, the first clear indication of embalming in Greece from the era when the Romans ruled there. A research team co-led by Frank Rühli of the University of Zurich was able to show that various resins, oils and spices were used to embalm the body, dating to A.D. 300. Along with the skeleton, the methods partially preserved some soft tissues from the body, most of which are now brittle, thin and extremely desiccated, including eyebrows, a muscle in the hand, hair and blood cells. Rühli told LiveScience that this a "unique finding for this temporal and spatial setting." The body was covered with a gold-embroidered purple silk cloth, indicating that the woman was probably of high social status, Rühli said. Her bones reveal that she was somewhere between 50 and 60 years old. The finding will be...

In July of 1518, a woman referred to as Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg, France and began a fervent dancing vigil that lasted between four and six days. By the end of the week, 34 others had joined her and, within a month, the crowd of dancing, hopping and leaping individuals had swelled to 400. Authorities prescribed "more dancing" to cure the tormented movers but, by summer's end, dozens in the Alsatian city had died of heart attacks, strokes and sheer exhaustion due to nonstop dancing. For centuries this bizarre event, known variously as the dancing plague or epidemic of 1518, has stumped scientists attempting to find a cause for the mindless, intense and ultimately deadly dance. Historian John Waller, author of the forthcoming book, "A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518," studied the illness at length and has solved the mystery....

Prof Stephen Hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures. They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation. But that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place? Now New Scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, working with Prof Thomas Hertog of the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. Prof Hawking is best known for his attempts to combine theories of the very small, quantum theory, and that of gravity and the very big, general relativity, into a new theory, called quantum gravity. Quantum...