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As well as the awesome temples, tombs and treasure that ancient Egypt has left to us, this civilisation has another claim to fame. It was the world’s first territorial nation, and it set the template for countries of today. Now a carbon dating study suggests that this powerful and efficient state was built surprisingly quickly. […]

The isolated Nicoya peninsula in northwest Costa Rica is one of my favourite places in the world – where rainforests populated by parrots, monkeys and armadillos meet golden beaches decorated with shells and coconuts. Perhaps its beauty is rubbing off on the residents. I’ve just written an article for Nature News about a study to […]

I was exhausted when I woke up this morning (thanks to a teething nine-month-old) but then I saw this, and felt ready to embrace the day. It’s a free e-book called Glossodahlia. On its pages, strange and wonderful plants blossom from battered, retro tins and cans. The flowers are taken from the pages of the […]

Last night, after days of anti-government protest, Egypt’s army ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, with the apparent blessing of the people. To me, the events seemed hard to understand. After fighting so hard for democracy in the first place, why were the Egyptian people so happy for the army to step […]

“We started cleaning around the shaft mouth of tomb KV40,” Egyptologist Susanne Bickel told a rapt audience at the Ancient World conference in London yesterday. “And then we fell into something new.” That “something new” turned out to be the first new tomb to be unearthed in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings since the treasure-filled […]

King Tutankhamun is famously the only Egyptian pharaoh who still occupies his original tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and since 2007 his mummy has been proudly displayed in a smart, glass case. What’s less well known, however, is that this isn’t the whole King Tut: a tiny piece of his mummy was removed […]