CAIRO: In a groundbreaking archaeological discovery, a joint Egyptian-British team has uncovered the ancient tomb of King Thutmose II near Luxor, marking the first time in over a century that a pharaonic royal burial site has been found, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced on Tuesday.

Located west of the Valley of the Kings, Thutmose II’s tomb was the last lost tomb of the kings of Egypt’s 18th dynasty, and the first royal tomb discovered since King Tutankhamun’s in 1922, the ministry said.

Archaeologists were able to identify the tomb due to alabaster vessels found on site and inscribed with the name of King Thutmose II and his wife Queen Hatshepsut, one of a small handful of women to have ruled Egypt.

They also found pieces of his funerary furniture, as well as pieces of mortar with blue inscriptions, yellow stars and religious writing, the statement said.

However, due to flooding soon after the king’s death, the tomb was generally not well preserved, the ministry statement added. There were indications that most of its contents had been moved, and work to recover them was underway, it said.

Residents in a central Manila neighbourhood lined up on Wednesday, as dengue cases spike nationwide, to collect a bounty — one peso for every five mosquitoes, dead or alive.

Carlito Cernal, village captain in Addition Hills, said the awareness-raising project he initiated could have a “huge impact” on curbing the tropical disease’s spread when combined with local clean-up efforts.

Philippine health officials and experts who spoke to AFP were less convinced, but enthusiasm was high among residents who carried pails, cups and other containers filled with dengue-spreading mosquitoes to exchange for cash at the village hall.

Iluminado Candasua brought three live specimens in a sealed plastic cup that were duly counted and transferred by village officials to their so-called death chamber, a glass-enclosed UV light machine.

“It’s very hard to capture mosquitoes,” Candasua told AFP, explaining how he strategically chose a darkly lit fire station where he used a cup to manually trap the insects against a wall.

Candasua said the peso he got for his efforts, worth little more than a US penny, would go into a piggy bank he’s using to save for a cellphone for his child.

The World Health Organisation ranked the Philippines as the country most affected by dengue in the Western Pacific region in 2023 when it had 167,355 cases and 575 deaths.

The tropical disease, while rarely fatal, carries symptoms ranging from fever and headaches to swollen glands.

The country has seen an “unusual rise” in cases this year, with 28,200 patients recorded as of February 1, according to Department of Health spokesman Dr Albert Domingo, a 40% increase from the same period last year.

Five cities and municipalities have declared outbreaks.

Domingo told AFP on Wednesday it was important that local communities consult with health authorities before launching ad hoc efforts, adding that the problem was best addressed by “going back to the fundamentals”.

“The sooner we clean our surroundings and overturn any possible areas where stagnant water is collecting, then we will have a better fight against dengue,” he said, urging residents to protect themselves with insect repellent and long sleeves.

Public health expert Anthony Leachon told AFP that while he welcomed all anti-dengue initiatives, the Addition Hills roundup would have “little or no impact at all”.

Some residents, he warned, might even exacerbate the problem by cultivating mosquitoes for coins.

While Rachel Estoque did not intentionally breed mosquitoes, the haul she turned in Wednesday came from a source of stagnant water in her home.

The 45-year-old housewife told AFP she woke up early to catch mosquito larvae growing in water in her flower pot. The 20 larvae earned her four pesos, enough for a tiny packet of cooking oil.

But like others waiting to trade in their catch, Estoque said the money was less important than the principle involved.

“My child suffered from dengue before and I know how scary and difficult that is… that’s why I’m participating in this project,” she said.

A large sinkhole has appeared in a southern English village, swallowing up at least one garden and forcing authorities to evacuate residents from around 30 homes.

The development of the sinkhole in the Surrey village of Godstone, which appeared on Monday and had grown to at least 20 metres on Tuesday, has been declared a major incident by local agencies.

The BBC said the evacuated properties were built about three years ago, on the site of a former sand quarry. One of the residents, Noosh Miri, said her family was among those evacuated.

“We got a violent knocking on the door,” Miri said. “As I opened the door, it sounded like I was in a waterfall because the sinkhole was right in front of my doorstep.”

Another resident, Rez Mira, told the BBC his garden fell into the sinkhole: “It’s collapsed, the wall will come down, for sure… we’re terrified.”

Surrey County Council (SCC) said investigations were ongoing, and asked people to avoid the area while work was carried out. Residents from within the cordon were being supported with advice around accommodation, the council said.

“The Local Resilience Forum will continue to meet throughout this incident to ensure everything is being done to resolve the situation as quickly and safely as possible,” said SCC’s Carl Bussey.

SES Water said in the early hours of Tuesday it was aware of a burst water main pipe in Godstone High Street. It said on Wednesday it had been able to restore supplies to affected properties. Electricity has also been restored.

An Indian student found an innovative solution to hours-long traffic jams as he paraglided to his examination centre to avoid being late in Maharashtra’s Satara district.  

A video of Samarth Mahangade, a student from Pasarani village in Maharashtra, flying through the sky with his college bag is making the rounds on social media.  

With only 15-20 minutes left for the exam to begin, Mahangade decided to paraglide to the venue instead of getting stuck in traffic for hours, the NDTV reported.

According to the report, Samarth was in Panchgani to run errands on the day of his exam. Realising he only had 15-20 minutes left to get to the centre, he decided to take the paragliding route to avoid the heavy traffic on the Wai-Panchgani road, especially in the Pasarani Ghat section.

Govind Yewale, an adventure sports expert from GP Adventures in Panchgani, came up with the solution. With his team, he arranged everything for Mahangade to fly over the traffic, allowing him to reach the exam venue on time.

The student safely landed near his college and succeeded in appearing in the examination.

A Brazilian couple, Manoel Angelim Dino and Maria de Sousa Dino, now 105 and 101 respectively, have been married for an incredible 84 years and 77 days, setting a Guinness World Record for the longest marriage for a living couple.

Times were very different when they tied the knot in 1940 at the chapel of Boa Ventura in Ceara, Brazil.

Born in 1919, Manoel and Maria (1923) first met around 1936 while working in agriculture for their families, according to guinnessworldrecords.com.

Manoel had travelled to the Almeida region in the Boa Viagem district to collect a shipment of rapaduras (a traditional Brazilian candy) where he made her acquaintance, but it wasn’t until some years later that they started a relationship.

In fact, their original meeting did not lead to much at all, and it was only after a chance encounter around 1940 that Manoel decided Maria was the person he wanted to spend his life with.

He apparently fell in love at first sight and was determined not to let the opportunity slip away again, so declared his feelings for Maria and asked her out, to which she said yes.

As per the report, Maria’s mother was initially against the relationship, so Manoel had to earn the trust of her family, and soon began building a home for the future they would share.

After getting the family’s approval, Manoel and Maria tied the knot in 1940. They worked side-by-side cultivating rolled tobacco to sell and support their growing family. It was a struggle, but they were able to raise 13 children, who later blessed them with 55 grandchildren, 54 great-grandchildren, and now 12 great-great-grandchildren.

A humpback whale briefly swallowed a kayaker in southern Chile, before spitting him out unharmed, an amazing escape that was all captured on video.

Adrian Simancas was paddling off the Patagonian city of Punta Arenas on Saturday when the giant baleen surged out of the water swallowing him and his yellow kayak whole.

Five seconds later a stunned Simancas bobbed to the surface, as the whale’s dorsal again emerged above the surface of the frigid gray water.

“I thought he’d swallowed me!” Simancas exclaimed.

The entire remarkable episode was caught on camera and quickly went viral after being posted on social media by his father, Dell Simancas, who can be heard shouting “Relax! Relax!” to his understandably unrelaxed son.

“Grab it, grab it” the father adds, instructing his son to keep a hold of the kayak to stay afloat while the whale continued to swim behind him,

“Relax, relax, I’m coming,” the father says. “Let’s go to shore.”

The 24-year-old son told Chile’s TVN channel he saw something “blue and white passing close to my face, and it was like on one side and above me.

“I didn’t understand what was happening and then I sank. I thought it had eaten me.”

His father said he turned around and “didn’t see anything, I didn’t see Adrian.

“That was the only moment of fear I really had, because I didn’t see him for like three seconds. And suddenly he shot out,” he told TVN.

Experts said the whale could never have swallowed the kayaker, as humpbacks have small throats.

“It seems that the kayak was right in the whale’s feeding patch (of krill or fish),” marine biologist Maria Jose Perez, of the University of Chile, told AFP.

That is why it is seen “emerging to the surface sideways, with its mouth open.”

“These events are very rare and have happened in the presence of silent vessels, such as kayaks,” she said, explaining that the whale probably did not notice the small boat.

MILAN: Italian authorities have successfully frozen nearly €1 million (£870,000) after a prominent businessman fell victim to a sophisticated scam involving artificial intelligence. 

Officials revealed on Wednesday that the funds, which were transferred to a foreign bank account, were part of a scheme where fraudsters used AI to impersonate Italy’s Defence Minister, Guido Crosetto.

Fraudsters used AI to mimic the voice of the minister, making calls that claimed to seek urgent financial assistance for the release of kidnapped Italian journalists in the Middle East.

Some of Italy’s most prominent business figures, including fashion designer Giorgio Armani and Prada co-founder Patrizio Bertelli, were targeted, prosecutors in Milan said earlier this week. However, only Massimo Moratti, the former owner of football club Inter Milan, was believed to have sent the requested funds.

Officials said they thought it would be hard to retrieve the missing funds, but on Wednesday they revealed the cash had been traced to the Netherlands.

“I’m very pleased that the money fraudulently taken from an entrepreneur, using my falsified voice and name, has been traced to a Dutch account and completely frozen,” Crosetto said on X. “Excellent work by the magistrates and the police forces.”

There was no immediate comment from Moratti, who had transferred two payments totalling almost one million euros, under the mistaken belief that he would be reimbursed by the Bank of Italy, sources familiar with the case have said.

Moratti filed a legal complaint last week after realising he had been duped. “It all seemed real. They were good. It could happen to anyone,” he told Italian daily La Repubblica at the weekend.

The scam involved fraudsters posing as officials from the defence ministry, with calls that appeared to originate from government offices in Rome. They then passed the phone to a man they said was Crosetto, who asked for money, saying the government could not be seen to be behind the transactions.

The defence minister has said they used AI technology to convincingly simulate his voice.

PARIS: Dancing turtles have proved for the first time that some animals use Earth’s magnetic field to create a personal map of their favourite spots, scientists said on Wednesday.

Some animals that migrate across the globe — such as birds, salmon, lobsters and sea turtles — are known to navigate using the magnetic field lines that stretch from Earth’s north to south pole.

Scientists knew the animals used this magnetic information as a compass to establish where they were. Now they increasingly believe the turtles are also able to plot a magnetic map featuring important places such as nesting or feeding spots.

This would require the migratory animals to “learn the magnetic coordinates of the destination,” according to a study in the journal Nature led by Kayla Goforth of the University of North Carolina.

The study said the research provides the first “direct evidence that an animal can learn and remember the natural magnetic signature of a geographical area”.

Exactly how they manage this remains unknown.

The researchers found that the turtles’ talent for map-making was separate from their inner compass, suggesting that the two forms of “magnetoreception” work in different ways.

For the experiment, the scientists put young loggerhead turtles in a tank surrounded by a magnetic coil that replicated the magnetic field of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Turtle dance’

Every day over two months, the scientists changed the magnetic field of the tank between the North American coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

The turtles however were only fed when they received the magnetic information of one of the areas.

When the turtles anticipated food, they flapped around, opening their mouths and spinning in circles in the water.

The researchers filmed this behaviour, dubbed the “turtle dance”.

The turtles danced with the most enthusiasm in the tank they knew would give them with food.

This was “strong evidence” that turtles can learn the magnetic signatures of “specific geographical areas,” the researchers said.

Even when tested four months later, the turtles still knew where they should dance.

No one knows exactly how animals tune into this magnetic information.

One theory is that some can detect the magnetic field’s influence during a chemical reaction between light-sensitive molecules.

But when the researchers tried to mess with this process by using what is called radiofrequency fields, the turtles kept on dancing on their spot, undisturbed.

A separate experiment testing the turtles’ inner compasses was more successful.

In a tank replicating the magnetic conditions of the West African archipelago Cape Verde, the radiofrequency emissions seemed to scramble the turtles’ compasses, sending them off in random directions.

The researchers concluded that “a reasonable working hypothesis is that the compass sense relies on chemical magnetoreception, whereas the map sense relies on an alternative mechanism.”

This hypothesis is backed up by signs that other migratory animals such as birds and amphibians may also have dual magnetic field receptors.

Struggling to get your dog to fetch your slippers? Scientists who strapped eye-tracking helmets to a bunch of dogs have found the perfect tactic to get them to pay attention.

Both pointing and staring at an object is the best way for dog owners to get their pets to follow directions, according to a new study on Wednesday.

The owner’s gaze and gesture are useful separately, “but combined they are stronger,” lead study author Christoph Voelter of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna told AFP.

The team of Austrian researchers put headgear on 20 dogs to detect exactly where the pooches looked when they were confronted with a range of scenarios.

The test subjects included eight mongrels as well as Staffordshire terriers, Australian shepherds and poodles.

For the experiment conducted in the university’s Clever Dog Lab, each canine faced a scientist on their knees. A bowl was placed on each side of the scientist, only one of which contained a hidden treat.

The dogs were then presented with five different scenarios, six times each.

The scientists would point at the bowl while staring at the dog, or point and look at the bowl at the same time, or look only at the bowl.

They even used the classic prank that many dog owners play on their pets — they pretended to throw a ball in the direction of the bowl while keeping it in their hand.

Recordings from the headgear showed that the dogs fared best when the scientist both pointed and stared at the bowl that contained the treat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they did the worst when the scientists pretended to throw the ball.

But do they understand?

For the researchers, this finding pointed towards the hypothesis that dogs follow human referential communication cues, rather than simply directional ones.

In other words, the dogs could understand the meaning of the information they were being given — in this case, a treat is that way —rather than just running in the direction they are being pointed.

But the researchers were careful not to hastily conclude.

Exactly how much the dogs understood what was happening remains an open question, Voelter emphasised.

“Is it for them more like an imperative directive to go somewhere? Or do they understand it more in a communicative way?” he said.

More research in this field of natural pedagogy would be needed, according to the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The field normally studies how communication clues — such as pointing and looking at an object while naming it — help young children learn the names of everything around them.

The researchers are also looking into how this works for dogs, Voelter said.

The next step is figuring out whether dogs are also better at learning and memorising things “when we address them,” he added.

A three-year-old water buffalo has been named the tallest among his kind in the world, with a height of 6 feet and 0.8 inches from hoof to withers. 

Named King Kong, the majestic buffalo, is a resident of the Ninlanee Farm in Nakhon Ratchasima and is almost 20 inches taller than the average adult water buffalo, the Guinness World Records stated. 

Owner Suchart Booncharoen said it was expected of King Kong to grow to this massive size as he was huge at the time of his birth and that is why he was named after the iconic gorilla from the film, according to UPI. 

An employee of the farm,  Cherpatt Wutti, said despite King Kong being of an intimidating size, the buffalo is quite friendly and playful. 

“He is very obedient. He loves to play around, he loves to be scratched, and running around with people,” she said. 

“He is really friendly and it’s like having a big, powerful puppy on the farm,” she added.