Egyptian museum and Proxima Centauri

Egypt revamps 100-year old museum

(from CNN.com/tech/science/)

Its stock of pharaonic artifacts is unrivaled, but as Cairo’s Egyptian Museum marks its centenary most of the 160,000 priceless items are crammed in inadequate displays or gathering dust in storage out of sight. The building opened in 1902 and still draws up to 10,000 visitors a day, but its role as a generator of vital tourist dollars has finally prompted a major revamp to restore its grandeur and create a museum for pharaonic masterpieces.

From the so-close-yet-so-far department…

Proxima Centauri comes into focus

An international team of astronomers has succeeded in accurately measuring the size of a small star for the first time. Damien Ségransan and colleagues at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) have studied Proxima Centauri — the nearest star known after the Sun. The star, which is about 4.2 light years away, was found to be just one-seventh the diameter of our Sun (D Ségransan et al. 2002 Astronomy and Astrophysics to appear)